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Journalism of Courage
There are concerns within certain quarters of the Union Government that Google might try to get its ongoing antitrust case at the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) remanded back to the competition regulator, a senior government official said.
The concern stems from the fact that this could delay the enforcement of the original order passed by the Competition Commission of India (CCI), which could significantly alter the way Google offers its services to other developers and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).
“Google is trying hard to delay the implementation of the CCI order, which the Supreme Court had also declined to intervene in. They want to achieve this by somehow getting NCLAT to remand the case back to the CCI, effectively nullifying the order and buying 1-2 years’ time for the CCI to go through a fresh investigation,” the official said.
To be sure, Google is well within its legal rights to argue for the case to be remanded back to the CCI. In a submission earlier this year Google had alleged that the competition watchdog “copied” parts of an EU ruling in its order to fine the firm. Google did not respond to a request for comment.
The CCI’s order, which also imposed a penalty of around Rs 1,338 crore, requires Google to not deny access to its Play Services plugins to “disadvantaged” OEMs, and the licencing of Play Store to OEMs should not be linked to the requirement of pre-installing Google search, Chrome browser, YouTube, Google Maps, Gmail or any other Google application.
Google, for its part, has argued that if it were to abide by CCI’s order, which calls for allowing different versions of Android (commonly known as ‘Forks’), then the ecosystem will be harmed.
“Devices built on incompatible ‘forks’ would prevent Google from securing those devices, as these versions will not support the security and user safety features that Google provides,” Google had said in a blog post earlier.
