Merger Control In Digital Economy: Challenges And Evolving Regulatory Paradigms Under Competition Law
- IJLLR Journal
- Dec 5, 2025
- 2 min read
Tanya Kathuria, LLM-CCL, Christ University, Bangalore (Central Campus)
ABSTRACT
Digital economy has changed markets the world over where business models are founded on data, networks, and innovation, rather than on the traditional revenue or asset growth. This transformation brought strong inconsistencies with the merger control in Competition Act, 2002, at the beginning of the time when traditional industries were considered where competition was evaluated by the market share, turnover, and price effect. Most services in digital markets, however, are offered gratis, competitive power lies in the centralization of data, and acquisitions are used to reduce the future competition more often than to receive instant revenue. Obsolete notification thresholds based on turnover and assets have not been able to identify such acquisitions, and arguably anti-competitive killer acquisitions have gone unnoticed.
Significant problems include that it is difficult to assess harm in zero-price markets, the risk of data concentration is rising, market-driven dominance by monopolies via network effects, and the stifling of innovation by acquisition of nascent companies. The Competition Commission of India (CCI) has equally been limited in application of algorithmic competition and data- driven business models by its inability to do so due to technical expertise. Observing such shortcomings, the Competition (Amendment) Act, 2023 introduced a value of deals (DVT) according to which the mergers involving more than 2,000 crore of the turnover or assets of the target company would be notified, regardless of the insignificance of their turnover or assets. This amendment is one of the significant steps towards capturing data-driven, high-value acquisitions that have hitherto not been within the regulatory net. The paper critically examines the question of merger control in Indian digital economy, confirms the applicability of the deal value threshold to real-life situations, and emphasizes the necessity of more prospective, innovation- sensitive enforcement. Our conclusion is that recent changes are positive, but that more optimization of legal tools, technical complexity of the CCI, and active regulatory methods are required to ensure competition, innovation, and consumer welfare in the developing digital market of India.
Keywords: Digital Economy, Merger Control, CCI, Competition Law, Big Tech.
