A statute built for platforms that don't fit old categories
Vietnam's Law on E-Commerce 2025 (No. 122/2025/QH15), passed by the National Assembly on December 10, 2025 and in force since July 1, 2026, exists because regulators finally admitted that a platform like TikTok Shop is not a marketplace and not a media feed — it is both at once. The law creates four distinct legal categories of e-commerce operator, including a specific "social network with e-commerce features" class covering apps that combine communication, ordering, and livestream selling in one interface. Depending on which functions a foreign platform activates for Vietnamese users — and whether it uses the Vietnamese language, a .vn domain, or crosses defined transaction thresholds — it must either incorporate a local legal entity or appoint an authorized in-country representative, per the statute text published by LuatVietnam. Sellers need verified identity and business registration before listing; livestream hosts must be authenticated before they can broadcast a sale. Platforms carry joint liability for consumer harm if they fail these duties, as B-Company's legal analysis details. Platforms already operating get a transition window through June 30, 2027 before the new entity and verification rules bind them.
This is a real regulatory achievement in one narrow sense: it names the hybrid platform as a category instead of pretending TikTok Shop is either a telecom app or a shop and regulating it as neither. Bangladesh, which has the same platform doing the same thing to the same category of small merchant, has not made that conceptual leap — and the gap shows.
Bangladesh has rules for e-commerce and rules for platforms, but none for the overlap
Bangladesh's Commerce Ministry issued the Digital Commerce Operation Guidelines in 2021 and, the following year, stood up the Digital Business Identification (DBID) registry, requiring any e-commerce or f-commerce operator — explicitly including sellers running solely off a Facebook or social-media page — to obtain a business ID, as Apparel Resources reported. That is a genuine, sensible registration floor, and one Vietnam's own drafters would recognize. But DBID is a business-identity filing, not a platform-liability framework. It says nothing about who verifies a livestream host's identity before they go live selling counterfeit cosmetics, or who is accountable when a platform's algorithm surfaces a seller with fifty complaint threads. Enforcement of anything past registration falls across the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission, Bangladesh Bank, and the Directorate of National Consumer Rights Protection, whose "overlapping responsibilities... delay timely resolution of consumer grievances" and diffuse accountability among regulators, according to a peer-reviewed analysis in the International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science. The same paper puts a number on the scale of what falls through: more than 500,000 small businesses operate through Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram in Bangladesh, mostly without registration, tax compliance, or any consumer-protection obligation. The ICT Division, meanwhile, confirms on its own site that its remit runs to policy, infrastructure, and digital-skills programs — not platform or e-commerce oversight — leaving the social-commerce gap to whichever agency claims it that week, per ictd.gov.bd.
That gap is why the Commerce Ministry's draft Cross-Border Digital Commerce Policy 2026 — published for public feedback on July 22 with comments due August 6, per multiple Dhaka business dailies — matters, even though it is narrower than Vietnam's law. It would require foreign platforms including Facebook, YouTube, and Google to register with the ministry before selling to or advertising toward Bangladeshi consumers, pay applicable VAT and income tax, and route cross-border payments through a proposed escrow system. That is a tax-and-advertising registration regime, not a livestream-seller-verification regime — it does not yet touch the specific failure mode Vietnam's law targets, which is fraud embedded in the sale itself, not just the ad that led to it.
The steelman, and where it runs out
The case for Vietnam's approach is not hard to make: livestream commerce is genuinely harder to police than a static storefront, because the "listing" is a thirty-second unscripted pitch that can vanish before a regulator or a defrauded buyer screenshots it. Requiring verified identity before a host can broadcast a sale, and putting the platform on the hook when it doesn't enforce that, directly targets the mechanism of the fraud rather than a proxy for it. Bangladesh's own 500,000-seller f-commerce sector, where a market projected by the Centre for Policy Dialogue to grow from $6.6 billion in 2022 to $10.5 billion by 2026 runs almost entirely on unverified social accounts, is exactly the kind of environment that produces fake shops and unrecoverable advance payments, as Prothom Alo reported on the CPD projection.
But Vietnam's fix is a heavier instrument than the specific failure requires. Mandating a Vietnamese legal entity for any "social network with e-commerce features" crossing a transaction threshold is a market-access barrier dressed as a consumer protection rule — it burdens a mid-sized platform experimenting with local livestream selling far more than it burdens TikTok, which can absorb the compliance cost easily. Bangladesh should take the diagnosis from Vietnam's law — verify the seller and the livestream host, hold the platform jointly liable for enforcement failures — without importing the entity-incorporation cudgel. The existing DBID registry is a workable enforcement anchor; layering seller- and livestreamer-verification duties onto it, and giving one agency (not three) the mandate to enforce them, would close the actual gap the RSIS research and DNCRP's own jurisdictional confusion describe. The August 6 comment deadline on the Cross-Border Digital Commerce Policy is the moment to write that specificity in — before, not after, TikTok Shop's Bangladesh volumes make retrofitting the rule politically harder.