Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

Welcome back to another edition of Tech x Policy. 

It’s been a week of chickens coming home to roost for the tech world. First, cryptocurrency exchange FTX’s founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) was charged on Tuesday with criminal fraud and conspiracy for the US$7-billion fiasco his firm landed its customers in. SBF was also (finally) arrested on Monday, over a month after the FTX implosion became public—time he spent sending out cryptic tweets and confounding listeners during expensive talk events.

Meanwhile, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey came out in defence of his former employees after a series of online and offline incidents of harassment against them. (Un)funnily enough, the harassment seems to have been emboldened by the positions taken by the current self-proclaimed Chief Twit, Elon Musk, who is promoting a set of leaked internal documents called the “Twitter Files” which purportedly show that political bias influenced Twitter’s earlier moderation decisions. Things have reached such a pitch that Twitter’s former head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, had to leave his home. You can read a nice nuanced take on the whole episode from TechCrunch here. 

But while all this goes on on the other side of the world, in India, we’re seeing the release of several new government draft bills and guidelines that could change the way telecom- and internet-based industries work. We’ve covered several of these over our few past editions (you can find all of them here), and today is no different. 

Here’s Vanita with today’s tech policy breakdown. 

And it’s all about reviews.

The government wants to curb fake reviews. But what is a fake review? 

Here’s a number to start things off. 

An increase of just one star in ratings on ecommerce platform Amazon correlates to a 26% increase in sales for that listing, according to a recent analysis by the e-commerce consulting firm Pattern.

When it comes to digital commerce, reviews are important. Thinking about trying a new restaurant? Online reviews are the first stop. Booking a hotel you’ve never been to? Same. New skincare product? New electronic gadget? New pet sitter? Ditto. Ditto. Ditto. 

So it shouldn’t be surprising that sellers want to show off the best ones. And that unscrupulous sellers want to manipulate them. 

And this is a problem anyone who’s shopped online can attest to. Reviews on most platforms right now are pretty easy to manipulate, especially since not the operators of many such sites don’t seem very motivated to crack down on them.