Big Tech’s digital market practices under scrutiny in India

While addressing the Annual Conference on Competition Law and Practice organized by Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) along with CCI, Gupta said, “With control over used data and online real estate, the digital platforms are in a unique position to shape and influence consumers choices on one hand and steer consumer traffic to their businesses to the other.”

The government had earlier said that it is examining the power of big tech companies on digital advertising, spurring speculation that India may seek to regulate their relationship with news publishers.

Earlier this year, the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA) and the Indian Newspaper Society (INS) approached the Competition Commission of India (CCI) accusing Google of abusing its market dominance.

In March, the anti-trust authority decided to club the two allegations and ordered a probe into Google on the matter. INS had written a letter to Google in February last year, asking the technology giant to compensate newspapers for using content published by them on its platform. It also sought a larger share of online advertising revenue.

‘Concerns over competition & contestability’

The CCI chairperson further said that the gatekeeper position of these platforms is giving rise to concerns over their competition and contestability.

The impact of these ‘so-called ecosystems’ is compounded by the opacity in policies and the data advantage they have over both business users and potential competitors, Gupta noted.

“While India emerges as one of the biggest and fastest growing digital consumer bases, market distortions need to be corrected promptly. To address the challenges of enforcement and policy in this regard, the regulatory framework needed to adapt and reflect digital market complexities, reframe classic categories and concerns around personal and non-personal data and add other dimensions of quality and privacy, identify issues early on and cause faster remedial interventions,” he added.

The Commission has also been conducting a host of market studies on various sectors, including e-commerce, telecom and pharmaceutical, among others.

CCI is also in the process of setting up a Digital Markets and Data Unit (DMDU) as a center of expertise for digital markets to engage with stakeholders, provide inputs on policy issues and support data analytics, he said.

Google’s court defeat

The European Court of Justice’s General Court has largely rejected Google’s appeal of a record European Union antitrust fine imposed for throttling competition and reducing consumer choice through the dominance of its mobile Android operating system.

Critics and rivals of Alphabet unit Google, Amazon, Apple and Meta fear the deep-pocketed tech giants may challenge the new rules known as the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in court, tying up regulators and jamming the process.

Also, South Korea levied tens of millions of dollars in fines on Alphabet’s Google and Meta Platforms for privacy law violations.

In a statement, the Personal Information Protection Commission said it fined Google 69.2 billion won ($50 million) and Meta 30.8 billion won ($22 million).

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