EkaLore regularly releases analyses and notes concerning opportunities and challenges for Dynamic India enterprise growth. This new series of posts examines continuing fights between Indian regulators, the courts, and Alphabet/Google’s App Store business model.
These fights are important as it affects all consumer use of content created on the web and where the money goes for that use. Enterprises also have much at stake because these conflicts will affect Internet advertising, content-delivery revenues, and content availability and accessibility (including apps).
Alphabet’s Google (Google) has been continuing a long running fight with India’s Competition Commission of India (CCI). Two different proceedings focus on how Android is used in the Indian market (devices) and how payments are processed by Google (app store and in-app). The fights have resulted in the Indian Supreme Court Ruling (January 2023) upholding a CCI finding against Google’s business model practices on Android. Another CCI action saw Google in the wrong for anti-competitive practices in the business model for App Store and in-app purchases. Google has now changed how these legal remedies are to be implemented.
Google’s fight in India is similar to its fight in the EU (2018) actions and continuing rumblings about possible Federal government actions in the USA. Apple has seen similar fighting over its App Store and content pricing (Fortnight) over the years, including antitrust actions over uniform prices for content (ebooks).
Our next post in the series will focus on the business model itself. You’ll find the next post (and lots of other stories about Dynamic India at www.ekalore.com/india-business
Comments