Google appoints former NITI Aayog, CCI official as India public policy chief

Gulati was Joint Secretary, Digital Communications at NITI Aayog from August 2019 to April 2021, prior to which she served as an Officer on Special Duty with the Secretary of Telecom for more than two years.

From June 2014 to June 2016, she served as a senior official at the CCI looking at mergers and acquisitions, according to her LinkedIn profile. Gulati’s appointment comes at a time when the government and the antitrust watchdog are increasingly shining the spotlight on practices adopted by big-tech companies that have so far operated in regulatory blindspots.

This year alone, the CCI ordered a probe into Alphabet Inc, the parent company of Google, over allegations that the search giant has indulged in “abuse of dominance in news aggregation” and forced unfair terms on digital news publishers. In a different case, the CCI published initial findings of a case against Google, where it termed the Android owner’s billing system for app developers as “unfair and discriminatory”, paving the way for potential penalties.