Umar Javeed, Aaqib, and Sukarma Thapar, three young informants, finally forced Google to pay a whopping Rs 1,338 crore fine for abusing its dominant position in different markets itself with Android mobile operating system.
Although Sukarma Thapar and Umar Javeed were working as research experts for the CCI at the time, younger brother of Umar, Aaqib, was studying law at the University of Kashmir.
The CCI, India’s national competition regulator, is in charge of encouraging competition and attempting to prevent activities that have a significant adverse effect on competition in the market. Umar and Aaqib are Valley residents. The three young informants filed a complaint in 2018 alleging that Google was misusing its dominant position in various markets.
The Competition Commission of India fined Google Rs 1,337 crore for anti-competitive practices in the Android mobile device ecosystem.
The three young subjects are all lawyers by profession now, with Umar working for a government agency, Aaqib a practising advocate in Delhi, and Sukarma an independent law and policy consultant. Umar stated that gathering evidence was difficult because they only had direct exposure to customer information to back up their case.
“We can look at an Android phone and say there are some Google-owned apps that cannot be deleted even if we wanted to, but besides that, as consumers, we have little information on how exactly Android smartphone manufacturers and app developers are affected by the role Google plays in the Android ecosystem,” he explained.
Source: latestly.com
Aaqib stated that the three of them were already interested in how India’s digital market was shaping up and how technology policies and laws influenced consumers and tech companies.
“There were many late nights and early mornings where we would just work throughout the night. “I was still a law student then and helping these guys meant I was juggling research along with studying for exams and assignments,” Aaqib said.
Compiling a comprehensive documentation of information was a difficult task that took about two months. “We had to focus on our day jobs and then research for this later in the day. That is when we would have some free time,” Sukarma said. After that, events which were related to Google attracted the trio’s attention in Europe. “In July 2018, the European Commission (the EU’s competition watchdog) imposed one of its largest fines on Google of 4.34 billion Euros for violating EU antitrust rules,” Umar said.
Source: latestly.com
After reviewing the information provided by the three informants, the CCI began an investigation into Google’s behaviour in the Android mobile device ecosystem in April 2019, which resulted in the October 20 CCI judgement and fine. Google responded by saying it would look into the competition watchdog’s decision.
“CCI’s decision is a major setback for Indian consumers and businesses opening serious security risks for Indians and raising the cost of mobile devices for Indians.”
Source: latestly.com
CCI has tightened its knot about other big technology firms such as Apple and Facebook following their hauled up by European and Australian regulators, thanks to the whistleblowing of these three informants. CCI, on the other hand, has not been successful in going all in on such anti-competitive activities by these companies.
Aside from the current penalties, Google is also under investigation by CCI in two other cases. CCI hopes that these cases will serve as a “guideline note” for other businesses that may be breaking competition laws.
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