Indonesia Open Network: A Proven Plan to Deconstruct the E-Commerce Walled Garden

JAKARTA, Investortrust.id — When T. Koshy stands before a room of policymakers, he does not speak of building the next billion-dollar "super app." Instead, the Founding Managing Director and CEO of India’s Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) speaks of a return to the past.

Addressing the 12th annual Indonesia Economic Forum on Thursday, Feb 5, 2026, Koshy argued that while the internet was founded on democratic, public-good protocols like HTTP and SMTP, the evolution of e-commerce took a predatory, proprietary turn. He believes the rise of the "walled garden"—where a handful of platforms control entire market domains—has stifled innovation and marginalized the very producers it was meant to empower.

The fundamental problem, according to Koshy, is that intermediaries have become the controllers of business rather than the enablers. In the current platform-centric model, a seller’s visibility is restricted to the specific platform they have joined, forcing them to manage multiple integrations to achieve full market access.

"The commerce became walled gardens," Koshy observed, noting that in nearly every domain globally, two or three enterprises practically control everyone. To break this concentration, Koshy advocates for a digital infrastructure that treats commerce as a public utility rather than a private monopoly.

This involves a radical shift toward "unbundling of components and interoperability," allowing the buying interface, selling interface, and logistics to operate as separate, interconnected layers.

The core mantra of this movement is simplicity: "onboard once and be visible for everybody". By using open protocols, a small merchant in a remote village can plug into the network via a single seller application and instantly become discoverable to any buyer using any participating consumer app.

Koshy explained that this model restores the spirit of the early internet, where no single entity made money from the base protocols but everyone was able to innovate on top of them. This decentralization ensures that reputation and data are no longer the "private property of the platforms," but assets owned by the businesses themselves, allowing an artisan or farmer to build a nationwide reputation that follows them across the network.

The impact of this architectural shift is already being felt at scale in India. Dr. R.S. Sharma, former Chairman of ONDC, noted that digital monopolies are notoriously harder to break than physical ones because of the "network effect" that keeps users locked into dominant apps.

However, by unbundling goods from logistics and payments, India has processed hundreds of millions of transactions across mobility, retail, and grocery sectors. Siddharth Prakash of Google Cloud pointed out that in 2025 alone, ONDC saw 200 million transactions, with the final 100 million occurring in less than six months, proving that "if you build technology or you build ecosystems which are open and fair... the adoption very quickly happens".

Indonesia is now positioning itself as the next frontier for this open network philosophy through the launch of the Indonesia Open Network (ION).

The stakes are particularly high for the archipelago, where 64.2 million micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) contribute 61% of the national GDP but remain largely excluded from the digital core.

Vice Minister Nezar Patria emphasized that ION is a "new way of thinking" designed to ensure that fairness is built into the system itself, rather than just written in policy. The network seeks to eliminate the high commissions and platform dependencies that Patria says "quietly hold them back".

The Indonesian government’s strategy is to treat this infrastructure as a "digital highway" that simplifies the administrative burden on small entrepreneurs. Minister for MSMEs Maman Abdurahman described a new philosophy for his ministry, moving away from a model where the government chases individual businesses to one where it provides the "sugar"—the integrated SAPAWIKM platform—to attract the "ants" of the private sector.

By collaborating with the India-inspired ION, Indonesia aims to convert the "readiness" of its 60 million merchants into "scalability," ensuring they can transact across the country’s 17,000 islands without being locked into a single intermediary.

As Koshy concluded, the success of such a movement cannot be bought with predatory pricing or venture capital; it must be a "collective movement" endorsed by the highest authorities and embraced by the masses.