India’s Digital Market Regulation: A Hybrid Model Of The US And EU Is The Way Forward?
- IJLLR Journal
- Mar 16
- 2 min read
Dipanshuk Ambastha, Government Law College, Mumbai
India’s market is growing at a tremendous speed, from application based market places and digital payments to online advertising and e-commerce ecosystems, a group of large technological companies exercises control over how businesses reach consumers and how consumers access markets. Though the growth has shown innovation, has lowered cost of transactions and also expanded consumer access but to the other side it has also concentrated economic power in the hands of large tech companies which is not adequately addressed through existing competition law and struggles to control.
The regulations interpretation is not theoretical anymore, policymakers are grappling with how the competition law should work when market is built not through price control anymore but through data accumulation, network effects and integration of platform ecosystems within the country. India faces this problem at a critical juncture.
While the Competition Commission of India (CCI), has taken necessary steps to investigate digital market practices, but enforcement of the same delays and fast growing business models show the limitations of solely relying on the traditional antitrust tools.
Under the Competition Act, 2002 , anti-competitive agreements are supervised under Section 3, abuse of dominance under Section 4, and combinations (mergers and acquisitions) under Sections 5 and 6. Although these provisions remain applicable to digital markets, they were drafted during the traditional economics markets.
Globally, regulators have taken different approaches. The European Union (EU) has welcomed an Ex-Ante regulation through the Digital Markets Act, 2022 (DMA), while the United States (US) has intensified litigation-based enforcement, which is rooted in their structural antitrust principles. India now, shows that it stands in between these two models. Rather than replicating either approach, India should work towards a hybrid model framework that combines important specific regulations of Ex-ante with strong ex post enforcement method, with keeping in mind the possibility of structural remedies suited to Indian Market realities.
