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Journalism of Courage
The widely anticipated hearings in the antitrust case against tech giant Google in the United States began Monday, with the judge in the case likely to deliver a punishment for Google’s internet search monopoly by August 2025.
The landmark case promises to strike at the heart of online empires that have conjured up a significant part of the public Internet, and could potentially alter the way digital businesses behave.
During the first hearing in the case on Monday, prosecutors made a myriad of allegations against Google – ranging from its dominance in the online advertising market, to eliminating competitors through acquisitions.
Last month, Judge Amit P Mehta of the US District Court of the District of Columbia, held that Google is a “monopolist,” saying that the company acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in online search. It took the United States four years to bring a case against Google which eventually culminated in the landmark ruling against the company.
The ruling could direct as severe a punishment as Google having to break up some of its businesses, restrict the company from signing exclusive deals with other companies to push its products, and it could also set a precedent for similar antitrust cases involving big tech companies like Apple, Amazon and Microsoft.
The judgement and the country’s subsequent action to address Google’s violation of competition laws – which includes proposals to break up the company’s various business units, as per media reports – could have a bearing on the regulatory discourse in India as well.
Here, Google has been found to be at odds with start-up founders over its billing policy, for the commision it charges from developers listed on its app store, and for allegedly stifling competition in the online advertising market – the major source of Google’s revenues globally.
In India, where the legislative ecosystem is slowly evolving to challenge big technology companies in an increasingly online world, competition is pegged to become an important regulatory tool for lawmakers. And the country has proposed a major overhaul of its antitrust landscape to rein in digital empires.
Taking a leaf out of the European regulatory handbook, India has proposed a new digital competition law that could stop tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon from self-preferencing their own services, or using data gathered from one company to benefit another group company.
The draft law, called the Digital Competition Bill, 2024, also has provisions to set presumptive norms to curb anti-competitive practices before they actually take place, and promises to impose heavy penalties — which could amount to billions of dollars — for violations. If this were to go in force, it could require big tech companies to make fundamental changes to their various platforms.
The proposal is similar to the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which went into complete effect earlier this year, and requires large tech firms like Alphabet, Amazon and Apple to open their services, and not favour their own at the expense of rivals. The law came in on the back of a long history of anti-competitive practices by these companies.
There is concern within official quarters that in the last decade or so, a majority of the innovation has been confined to within the stables of a handful of big tech companies, mostly from the US. Officials believe that a big reason for this are the high market barriers for new entrants in the sector — in the online market, once a company gets a significant portion of the market, their product becomes the default way to access that particular service, with rivals finding it increasingly difficult to challenge their dominance.
Government officials believe that the big tech companies have shown a history of engaging in anti-competitive practices, and a presumptive framework would work better to address this. Last year, Google was fined Rs 1.337 crore by the CCI for its anti-competitive conduct in the Android ecosystem.
