As per updates, the CCI has challenged a part of the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal’s (NCLAT) verdict that upheld the Rs 1,337 crore penalty on Google.
The Competition Commission of India (CCI) has moved the Supreme Courtchallenging a part of the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal’s (NCLAT) judgement, which upheld a Rs 1,337 crore fine levied on Google for allegedly misusing its dominant position in the Android ecosystem, but set aside four of the 10 directives it imposed on the US tech giant to change its business model.
According to the Economic Times sources, the CCI has challenged the NCLAT’s direction that held that for proving abuse of dominance under Section 4 of the Competition Act, the competition watchdog is required to do an “effect analysis” and “the test to be employed in the effect analysis is whether the abusive conduct is anticompetitive or not.”
While accepting Google’s stand, the appellate tribunal had said the Section 4 specifically excluded discriminatory conditions or prices which may be adopted to meet the competition. It stated that the object of the competition law is to prevent practices which have an adverse effect on competition.
While the Supreme Court's website shows that the appeal was filed on June 5, the case is yet to be numbered due to some technical issues. Google has yet to challenge the NCLAT findings against it. The company and other parties have filed caveats in the top court to ensure that no order is passed in their absence.
The NCLAT in March partially upheld the CCI's October 20, 2022 order holding that the tech giant had abused its dominant position in markets such as online search and the Android app store. It gave Google 30 days to implement the other remedial measures as directed by the CCI except for the four that were set aside by it.
The appellate tribunal struck down the antitrust watchdog’s direction to Google to not deny access to its Play services application programming interface to disadvantage other equipment manufacturers, application developers and its existing or potential competitors. In addition to this, the tribunal struck down another CCI direction to allow the developers of application stores to distribute their app stores through Google’s Play Store. The appellate tribunal said these were “unsustainable”.
Source: The Economic Times
