The Times aren8217;t changing

So was India's largest circulating English-language daily, The Times of India, justified in virtually blacking out the news of the high-pr...

So was India8217;s largest circulating English-language daily, The Times of India, justified in virtually blacking out the news of the high-profile India launch of Yahoo!, perhaps the world8217;s best-known Internet portal? Was it a simple goof-up, or did the group deliberately decide to do in a major potential rival to its own portal, indiatimes.com? After all, in a country where the number of Internet users is still under 3 million, a news-group with daily sales of around 2 million and a readership of many times that, can deal a body blow to a new entrant like Yahoo! by massively downplaying its arrival in the country, as a small brief on the business page.

Certainly, the downplaying theory seems more likely, given that the day after Yahoo8217;s launch, The Times front-paged a story saying that Google, the search-engine that powers indiatimes.com was superior to others like Inktomi which Yahoo used to use.

This was followed by another sideways assault on Yahoo, again a front-page anchor, insinuating that indiatimes.com8217;s success made Yahoo switch over to Google 8212; Yahoo bowled over by Indiatimes googley?8217;To repeat the question, is The Times, or any other newspaper group, within its rights to virtually black out news of rivals, or free to slant news that makes rivals look stupid? And, in such a situation, what is the role of the government, and its various watchdog arms such as, say, a monopolies commission? Well, given the fact that the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Commission has issued no notice to The Times of India, clearly the government doesn8217;t view such abuse of market dominance as undesirable.

But before you blithely buy the argument that the government has no role to play in this essentially free-market-free-press matter, cast a glance at what8217;s happening the world over. Some days ago, on the heels of their first-innings victory over Microsoft, the US Department of Justice sued to block the 120 bn mega-merger of US telecom giants WorldCom and Sprint 8212; the DoJ argued that if the number two and three players in the long-distance US market tied up, this would hobble the long-distance telephone as well as the Internet market. In India, by contrast, no one8217;s scrutinising any of the telecom and Internet mergers that are announced almost every other week.

And many months after it continues to scrutinise the America On Line-Time Warner merger, the Fair Trade Commission in the US has asked AOL to give details of why it blocked users of Odigo, a new type of instant messaging software, from communicating with users of AOL8217;s instant messaging software. The US is also investigating possible collusion by MasterCard and Visa, and European anti-trust authorities are engaged in several such cases as well.

Needless to say, most customers don8217;t appreciate these trust-buster arguments. After all, for the non-geeks amongst us, the fact that Microsoft bundled all manner of software in Windows, including its Internet browser, was really a blessing now we didn8217;t have to go looking for different software all over the place. And if Microsoft did enter into exclusive licence agreements with companies like Compaq to pre-load Windows on their computers, didn8217;t it get us the software cheaper? On similar lines, how many of us can really appreciate the small beginnings of not anti-trust, but regulatory supervision, in India namely, the telecom regulator8217;s ruling that MTNL must form a separate company for running its cellular services.

The telecom regulator8217;s argument is that MTNL8217;s existing infrastructure can largely be used for the cellular network as well, that MTNL can also cross-subsidise its cellular operations from its fixed-phone business. So, if MTNL has a separate cellular company, it will not have an unfair advantage over the others. For us users, of course, this is gobbledygook. After all, if this allows MTNL to provide cellular services 40 per cent cheaper than Essar and Airtel or Orange, so much the better.

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Regulators in developed countries, however, are using a totally different approach, first evidenced with Microsoft, to anti-trust activities 8212; they argue that monopolies such as Microsoft stifle innovation, and so hurt customers. This is the argument used against Visa USA and MasterCard 8212; the US government alleges that MasterCard shelved plans to develop a smart card8217; or a credit card with a microprocessor, because Visa decided not to go ahead with a similar product. AOL, similarly, is being investigated for killing innovation by trying to block Odigo.

It is by no means certain that this innovation-based anti-trust reasoning will be accepted by even the developed countries 8212; indeed, the jury8217;s still out in the US, but there are enough cases out there to show a quantum shift in anti-trust activities.

Forget about such sophisticated methods of measuring, and then containing, anti-trust activities, the general lack of reaction not just from the government to The Times of India8217;s tactics shows just how far India has to go before it can genuinely ensure a level-playing field for everyone. The Times, of India, it would appear, aren8217;t quite ready to change as yet.