Everywhere you turn in Pakistan today, life runs through a screen. People have started to settle shop bills with instant transfers on their phones, book rides through apps, clear utility bills with a few taps, and order groceries and food without ever speaking to a cashier. Behind that everyday convenience is a state that has also learned how to act inside this digital world. Regulators and courts are now making calls about apps, platforms and data flows as routinely as they once stamped paper files. In the last few years alone, TikTok has been banned and restored more than once, Bigo and various dating or live-streaming apps have been taken offline, and cybercrime authorities have declared offshore gambling and trading platforms such as 1xBet and Binomo illegal. Whatever one thinks of the individual decisions, they show that when the state decides an issue matters, it can act on it. Where there is still a blind spot is on the economic side of this transformation. We have not yet fully answered a simple question: what happens when overseas platforms start earning significant money from Pakistani users, without a local footprint, while competing directly with businesses that are fully tied into our tax system, labour market and legal framework? Also read: ‘Local businesses can’t compete’: should Temu be banned in Pakistan? This gap matters even more in a period of high inflation. The cost of doing business for local retailers, sellers and manufacturers keeps rising as rents, utilities, transport and wages go up in rupees, while compliance itself has a cost. At the same time, these businesses are being asked to compete with overseas operators that enjoy scale, lower input costs and, in many cases, do not contribute to the local economy in any meaningful way. New marketplaces have flooded Pakistani social media feeds, promising clothes, gadgets and household items at prices that feel dramatically lower than local options. For ordinary consumers who are struggling with rising bills, it is completely understandable to click, compare and order. Two names now sit at the centre of this conversation: Temu and Shein. Both have gone from being curiosities to being heavily promoted in Pakistan. For a shopper, they are simply another option. For local retailers, brand owners and manufacturers, they represent a difficult equation: their own costs are rising every month in rupees, yet they are facing competition from entities that do not appear to carry the same domestic tax burden, do not run local payrolls at scale, and are not easy to engage through Pakistani regulators when something goes wrong. Bodies that exist precisely to represent local retail have taken notice. The Pakistan Retail Business Council and the Chainstore Association of Pakistan have both formally raised the issue, arguing that competition is welcome but has to be fair. If one side is steadily squeezed by inflation, documentation and compliance, and the other is able to reach the same customers without registering, reporting or building local capacity, the long-term result will be a shrinking formal sector and a loss of local jobs. The Competition Commission of Pakistan has treated these complaints as serious. It opened an inquiry into Temu’s model and then wrote to the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), noting that both Temu and Shein were operating in Pakistan without formal regulatory approval while being fully accessible nationwide, and recommending that PTA examine the case for action on competition and consumer-protection grounds. This is not a criticism of any institution. If anything, it shows that existing bodies are trying to work within their mandates: CCP can investigate unfair practices but cannot remove an app; PTA manages the pipes and platforms but has traditionally focused on connectivity and content. In between those mandates lies a space that has become very important, very quickly. Also read: CCP seeks ban on online marketplace Temu Temu’s experience in Europe helps to show why this space needs attention. Accounts filed for its Ireland-based EU parent, Whaleco Technology, show that in the 12 months to December 2024 its EU operations generated around 1.7 billion dollars in revenue and just under 120 million dollars in pre-tax profit, with a staff of only eight people and a corporation tax bill of about 18 million dollars, including a mandatory top-up under new global minimum tax rules. That is what a modern cross-border platform looks like: it can extract very large value from a market with a negligible physical footprint. If that is the challenge in Europe, it is understandable that Pakistan is still catching up. Parliament has experimented with tools such as a digital presence tax on foreign vendors and changes to the tax treatment of imported parcels, and regulators have begun publishing blacklists of illegal loan apps, betting sites and unregulated trading platforms. These are important steps, but what is still missing is a coherent approach for significant overseas platforms that operate here at scale. Temu and Shein make this oversight hard to ignore. When platforms can bombard Pakistani feeds with ultra-cheap offers, move thousands of parcels a day, and still leave almost no legal or tax footprint here, it is not just a quirk of globalisation, it is a problem for our regulators. At the very least, we should be asking whether these prices would remain quite so low if they had to operate like local players do, paying local taxes and carrying the same inflation in rents, utilities, payroll and financing that Pakistani retailers and manufacturers already face. The Competition Commission and major business associations have already raised the alarm. Keeping the issue in an open-ended “review” now only tightens the squeeze on documented local businesses that are bearing rising costs while competing with players who contribute little back to the economy. PTA does not have to close Pakistan off from the world, but it does need to move beyond silence and signal that large overseas marketplaces cannot treat this country as a one-way channel for orders and profits indefinitely.