Algorithmic Consumption And Ecological Cost: Re- Examining Consumer Protection In The Age Of AI- Driven Commerce

Full Text Link

Adv. Arathi Menon P R, High Court of Kerala

ABSTRACT

The proliferation of Artificial Intelligence in e-commerce, recommendation engines, and personalised advertising has fundamentally altered consumption patterns, often at significant and underexamined environmental cost. AI-driven “nudge” architectures, hyper-personalised recommendations, dynamic pricing, and algorithmically generated urgency cues such as flash sales, actively incentivise overconsumption, fuelling fast fashion cycles, packaging waste, and the rapid obsolescence of electronic goods, while the computational infrastructure underlying these systems (data centres, model training, cloud storage) carries its own substantial carbon and water footprint. This paper interrogates whether India’s existing consumer protection architecture, particularly the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 and the Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, 2020, is equipped to address these AI-specific environmental externalities. It examines the adequacy of provisions on unfair trade practices and misleading advertisements in capturing “dark pattern” design choices that drive ecologically harmful consumption, and considers whether algorithmic transparency can be read as an extension of the consumer’s right to know. The paper further explores comparative regulatory responses, including the EU’s Digital Services Act and emerging AI Act provisions on manipulative design, to assess transposable safeguards for the Indian context. It argues for a recalibrated enforcement framework under the Central Consumer Protection Authority that integrates environmental disclosure obligations, covering both the ecological footprint of AI-recommended products and the energy intensity of the recommending technology itself, into existing consumer-facing accountability mechanisms. The paper concludes by proposing a framework of “algorithmic eco-disclosure” as a necessary evolution of eco-labelling norms for the digital marketplace, situating consumer protection law as an active instrument of environmental governance rather than a passive bystander to technologically mediated consumption.

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Dark Patterns, E-Commerce, Consumer Protection Act 2019, Environmental Disclosure, Algorithmic Accountability

642. ALGORITHMIC CONSUMPTION AND ECOLOGICAL COST- RE-EXAMINING CONSUMER PROTECTION IN THE

Download ALGORITHMIC CONSUMPTION AND ECOLOGICAL COST- RE-EXAMINING CONSUMER PROTECTION IN THE • 362KB