The government is examining whether to relax the five-year timeline for foreign investors, required under the usual treaty template, to first exhaust Indian legal remedies before pursuing global arbitration for dispute settlement, they said. Under its 2024 investment pact with the UAE, India shortened this requirement to three years, signalling a special bilateral relationship.

The government is also weighing the pros and cons of granting the so-called most-favoured nation (MFN)-forward benefit, which means any concession offered by India to an investment partner under a bilateral treaty will automatically be extended to an existing partner, the officials said.However, safeguards will be built into any of these concessions to prevent potential abuse of treaty terms, they said.

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Two important principles

Foreign investors have long demanded relaxed terms under the Investor–State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism and MFN-forward concessions under investment treaties.
But any concession under BITs, according to the officials, will be guided by two principles: India won’t cede its future sovereign policy-making space, and it won’t allow the so-called “treaty-shopping” — essentially a strategy to dodge taxes.
A decision on these issues will be made after broader consultations, the officials said.

While the template will serve as a basis for negotiations, there will be no one-size-fits-all framework, and the final BITs will vary across countries depending on strategic, economic and other considerations, the officials stressed.

“The government is well aware of the sensitivities around such provisions. That’s why safeguards have to be built into any such relaxations, if they are finally approved,” said one of the officials. “But this is also the time to take the bull by the horns, because we need sustained foreign investments—a whole lot of them. The finance ministry is working on such issues.”

India is already planning to scrap the capital gains tax on investments in government securities by foreign portfolio investors.

It is pursuing BITs with over two dozen nations and blocs, including the EU, Russia, Saudi Arabia, the US, Qatar and Oman.

From caution to cautious optimism

The government has been cautious in forging investment treaties with other countries after an old treaty template–which formed the basis of dozens of such agreements with various countries between 1996 and 2016–led to litigation in several cases.

This prompted the government to draw up a new model in 2016. But the view now is that the 2016 template needs to be revised, ET has learnt.

The setbacks in arbitration rulings against the government, especially in the Vodafone tax case, further stoked caution.

However, deepening fears of capital outflows, especially after the West Asia war, and growing risk of capital reallocation driven by the global surge in artificial intelligence and other strategic technology investments, have warranted a fresh review of certain key issues around the basic negotiating terms of such treaties.

From $85 billion in FY22, total foreign direct investment (FDI) fell over two years before rising again to top $80 billion in FY25. Gross FDI inflows touched a peak of $94.5 billion in FY26. Net inflows, however, have remained subdued in recent years.

But even with changing menus, there has still been a deluge of chippies closing. At its peak around a century ago, there were approximately 35,000 fish and chip shops across the UK. There are now about 10,000, and industry leaders are concerned more could disappear as prices rise.

Australian businesses spent more on digital advertising last year than at any point in history. According to IAB Australia’s Internet Advertising Revenue Report, prepared by PwC, the market reached $18.4 billion in 2025 – an 11.5% jump on the year prior – with search advertising alone hitting $8.0 billion.

So why are a growing number of service-business owners convinced that spending more is no longer the answer to their lead problem?

The reason sits in a part of the funnel most advertisers never examine closely: the page a click actually lands on.

The Gap Nobody Is Pricing In

Every advertiser watches cost-per-click. Far fewer pay attention to what that click does next – and that, increasingly, is where the money quietly disappears.

A click is only the midpoint of a transaction. The visitor still has to arrive somewhere, understand it within seconds, trust it, and act. When they land on a homepage, a cluttered service page, or anything built for browsing rather than deciding, most simply leave. The business pays full price for the click and gets nothing for it.

The data is unambiguous. Dedicated landing pages built for paid traffic routinely convert at roughly double the rate of homepages or product pages fed the same visitors. For a business buying clicks on Google or Meta, that is not a rounding error. It is the difference between an ad account that produces booked jobs and one that steadily burns budget.

An Expert Read on the Problem

Michael Costin, a Gold Coast digital marketer who has spent more than a decade running paid campaigns for Australian service businesses, argues the industry has spent years optimising the wrong half of the equation.

“Everyone pours attention into the ad – the targeting, the bid, the creative – and then sends a perfectly good click to a page that was never built to convert it,” Costin says. “You can win the auction and still lose the lead. The auction was never the hard part.”

That frustration was common enough that Costin built a business around it. His company, Postclick, takes its name from the idea directly: in paid advertising, the outcome isn’t decided at the click, but in everything that happens after it.

What the Data Points Toward

The response Costin and a growing number of operators advocate is what he calls the “ad-first” landing page – a page designed backwards from the ad and the searcher’s intent, rather than forwards from a company’s existing website.

In practice it is unglamorous discipline rather than clever design. The page makes the same promise the ad made. It asks for one clear action instead of offering a dozen. It answers the precise thing the visitor typed into Google at the moment they needed help, and it removes every reason a ready buyer might hesitate. None of it is exotic. Almost all of it is routinely skipped.

That neglect is understandable. Ad platforms market themselves on reach, automation and scale – the parts they control. The landing page is the part the business controls, which is exactly why it tends to be the part that gets ignored.

Why It Matters More as Budgets Climb

The old assumption was that more spend meant more leads in a straight line. Rising click costs and increasingly automated campaigns have broken that maths. When the landing experience is weak, a bigger budget doesn’t fix the problem – it scales it.

For a local trades company, clinic or professional firm, that reframes the most important question. Before lifting an ad budget, the more profitable move is often to ask whether the page receiving it is built to convert at all. Fixing the page costs nothing extra per click and lifts the return on every dollar already being spent.

With national ad spend setting records and showing no sign of slowing, that distinction is beginning to separate the businesses pulling ahead from the ones simply paying more to stand still. The winners, increasingly, are not the ones buying the most attention. They are the ones doing the most with the attention they have already paid for.