By T. KOSHY


As the Indonesia Open Network prepares to launch, the country stands at a fork in the road,
between a digital future built on open rails for all, and one captured by platform monopolies
serving the few.
The world does not lack digital platforms. It lacks digital infrastructure. These are not the same
thing; and the distinction may be the most important strategic choice Indonesia makes this
decade.
Platforms extract. Infrastructure enables. Platforms compete for market share by concentrating
power; infrastructure expands market access by distributing it. As Indonesia prepares to launch
the Indonesia Open Network (ION) the country has a rare opportunity to make a deliberate choice
between the two. What makes this moment remarkable is that Indonesia is not navigating this
terrain without a map. The global South has spent the last several years writing one.

The historical warning we cannot ignore

Every great technological revolution reshapes who holds power. The Industrial Revolution
unlocked extraordinary productivity, but its benefits were concentrated among those who owned
the machines, the ships, and the trade routes. The Digital Revolution promised something more
democratic. It has not always delivered. What began as a genuinely open internet has drifted,
steadily, toward concentration. A handful of platform ecosystems now govern access to
commerce, credit, logistics, and customers for billions of small merchants and consumers
worldwide.
The Global South, home to the world’s largest populations of MSMEs, smallholder farmers, and
unbanked citizens, faces the sharpest version of this risk. Digital markets that should have lowered
barriers to participation have, in many cases, simply replaced one set of gatekeepers with another.
The commission fees changed hands; the power dynamic did not.
This is the context in which open networks have emerged, not as a technical alternative to
platforms, but as a governance choice. A choice to separate infrastructure from innovation,
protocols from platforms, and participation from permission.

What open networks actually do

Open networks operate on two principles that are deceptively simple: unbundling and
interoperability. Unbundling separates the layers of a digital ecosystem, discovery, logistics,
payments, trust, so that innovation can flourish independently at each layer. Interoperability
ensures that actors across these layers can transact with each other without a single platform
acting as the toll booth.
“Open networks do not replace markets. They redesign markets, creating shared public rails
that lower barriers for the many without eliminating ambition for the few.”
When these principles are embedded in infrastructure, rather than left to market forces, the result
is profound. Small merchants reduce their dependence on any single platform’s goodwill or fee
structure. Startups lower their customer acquisition costs without paying tribute to dominant
incumbents. Consumers, especially those at the margins of the formal economy, gain genuine
choice and transparency. Economies become more competitive and more resilient.
We are entering what might be called the Internet of Transactions: a new phase of connectivity
that is not merely a network for information, but a network for verified, trusted, interoperable
exchange. The architecture of this internet, open or closed, federated or centralised, will
determine who gets to participate in the digital economy of the next generation.

Indonesia’s structural readiness

Few countries are better positioned than Indonesia to lead this transition. With over 270 million
people spread across more than 17,000 islands, Indonesia’s geography has historically been its
greatest logistical challenge and its most compelling case for digital infrastructure. The
archipelago’s 64 million MSMEs, which account for roughly 97 percent of all business entities and
nearly 60 percent of GDP, have been chronically underserved by centralised platform models
designed for dense urban markets.
Indonesia also has what many emerging economies lack: a sophisticated regulatory imagination.
The country’s experience building GovTech infrastructure, its progress on digital identity through
the national population database, and its growing digital payment ecosystem have created the
institutional muscle memory to think about technology as public infrastructure, not merely as
private enterprise.
ION is the logical next step in this trajectory. By positioning itself explicitly as open and
interoperable digital public infrastructure, rather than another marketplace, Indonesia is making
an architectural statement before writing a single line of commercial code. That sequence matters
enormously.

The governance imperative

Open networks are not self-governing. This is perhaps the most important lesson from the
experience of jurisdictions that have built them. The technology is necessary but not sufficient.
Without deliberate governance architecture, open networks can drift toward de facto dominance
by the best-resourced participants, replicating the very concentration they were designed to
prevent.
For ION, this means governance decisions must be made before scale arrives, not after. Three
design principles are especially critical.
First, neutrality must be institutionalised, not assumed. The credibility of open network
infrastructure rests on the perception, and the reality, that no single participant can shape the
rules in their own favour. Standards-setting, certification, and dispute resolution must be
managed by genuinely independent, multi-stakeholder bodies. The governance structure is the
product, as much as the technology.
Second, open standards must be coupled with enforceable compliance. Interoperability is only
meaningful when all participants adhere to common protocols, for cataloguing, pricing
transparency, order routing, and settlement. The adoption of open protocols like Beckn, which
underpins several open commerce networks globally, must not be diluted under pressure from
large incumbents seeking bespoke arrangements.
Third, network growth should be demand-led rather than supply-driven. The strongest traction
for open networks emerges in sectors where MSMEs face genuine distribution bottlenecks,
hyperlocal retail, agricultural commerce, logistics aggregation, cooperative trade. Prioritising
these sectors for ION’s early rollout will generate organic adoption and demonstrate value before
the network asks participants to change deeply embedded behaviours.

The MSME safeguard imperative

Open networks create the possibility of fair competition. They do not guarantee it. Real MSME
inclusion must be actively engineered into the architecture of ION, it cannot be left to market
forces alone.
Three safeguards deserve particular attention. The first is discoverability equity. In digital
marketplaces, larger sellers naturally optimise for visibility. If ION’s ranking and discovery
systems are allowed to privilege capital strength over relevance, proximity, or quality, small
merchants will quickly find themselves crowded out, in an open network, no less. Algorithmic
neutrality principles, transparently defined and independently audited, are essential from the
outset.
The second safeguard is reducing onboarding friction. Documentation requirements, cataloguing
complexity, logistics integration, and digital payments readiness are disproportionate burdens for
small businesses. Public or cooperative onboarding support structures, perhaps anchored in
Indonesia’s existing cooperative and UMKM (micro, small, and medium enterprise) institutional
networks, can prevent exclusion before it becomes entrenched.
The third is embedded financial enablement. Open commerce infrastructure succeeds at its
greatest potential when transaction histories on the network become the basis for credit,
insurance, and working capital access. This is the virtuous loop that can transform ION from a
commerce network into an economic mobility platform for the country’s smallest businesses.

When AI meets open rails

ION will not launch into a static digital environment. Artificial intelligence is transforming every
layer of commerce, discovery, matching, logistics, fraud detection, customer service. This creates
both an extraordinary opportunity and a new class of risk.
The opportunity is real: AI can dramatically expand market access for small merchants, improve
discovery for consumers, and enable smarter, lower-cost logistics orchestration. In a country the
size and complexity of Indonesia, AI-enabled coordination could solve problems that have
resisted purely human-scale solutions for decades.
But AI also carries the risk of algorithmic concentration, of replacing platform monopolies with
AI monopolies. If intelligence becomes centralised in a few large models controlled by a few large
players, the architecture of open networks can be undermined from within. Open rails with
centralised AI become a new kind of walled garden.
“AI will amplify whatever architecture we build. If we build open networks, it will amplify
inclusion. If we build silos, it will amplify concentration. The choice must be made deliberately,
and it must be made now.”
This means ION’s governance framework must address AI from the start, not as an afterthought.
Intelligence in an open network must be augmentative rather than extractive, contestable rather
than monopolised, and accountable rather than opaque. The placement of AI capabilities, at the
edge, accessible to all participants, rather than only at the centre, is as much a governance
question as a technical one.

Indonesia’s regional moment

ION is not only a domestic infrastructure story. It is a regional one. ASEAN is home to some of
the world’s most dynamic digital economies and some of its most structurally excluded small
business communities. A successfully designed and deployed ION would be the first truly open,
interoperable commerce network at scale in Southeast Asia, a model, a proof of concept, and
potentially a foundation for cross-border digital trade corridors across the region.
The architecture choices Indonesia makes for ION, on governance, on standards, on algorithmic
neutrality, on MSME safeguards, will be studied and potentially replicated across ASEAN. Digital
corridors, once established, often precede physical trade expansion. In that sense, ION has the
potential to become one of Indonesia’s most significant regional engagement levers, one built on
non-extractive, open principles rather than on the vendor lock-in models that have characterised
much of the previous wave of digital platform expansion.
The Global South is watching. It needs models, not blueprints handed down from elsewhere. ION
can be a model, built in Indonesia, for Indonesia, with the confidence that open infrastructure is
not a national constraint but a national advantage.

The choice that defines the decade

Indonesia stands at an inflection point. The digital markets of the next decade will either be
shaped by platform logic, concentration, gatekeeping, extraction, or by infrastructure logic,
openness, interoperability, participation.
ION is Indonesia’s bid to build infrastructure. The technology is ready. The institutional capacity
is growing. The need, among 64 million MSMEs, millions of farmers and cooperatives, and
hundreds of millions of consumers, is undeniable.
What remains is the will to govern it well. To make neutrality non-negotiable before the first large
participant demands an exception. To design discoverability equity before the first algorithm tilts
the field. To embed financial enablement before the first small merchant decides the network is
not for them.
Inclusion is never automatic. It must be designed, governed, and defended. ION’s greatest test
will not be whether it achieves transaction volume, it will be whether, five years from now, the
warung owner in Sulawesi and the batik cooperative in Solo feel that the network was built for
them too.
That outcome is entirely achievable. It requires only that Indonesia make its architectural choices
now, with clarity, with ambition, and with the understanding that open networks are not just a
technical decision. They are a governance choice about who the digital economy is for.


T. Koshy is the founding Chief Executive Officer of ONDC — India’s national open digital commerce
network, which has processed over 400 million orders since launching transactions in 2023. He is
now leading the development of the Indonesia Open Network (ION) as a model for open,
interoperable digital commerce infrastructure in Southeast Asia.