Google Faces Antitrust Complaints in the US and India | 07 Aug 2024
Recently, a US District Court has found Google guilty of monopolistic practices in search and text advertising, disrupting its longstanding dominance and is coinciding with India’s new digital competition law discussions.
- Google has invested over USD 26 billion annually to maintain its default search engine status on devices, with a substantial market share of 89.2% in general search services and 94.9% on mobile.
- In India, the Alliance of Digital India Foundation (ADIF) has filed a complaint with the Competition Commission of India (CCI) claiming Google’s dominance hinders competition and negatively impacts Indian businesses.
- ADIF is an industry body for India's digital startups formed in 2020 to transform the Indian startup ecosystem into the top 3 globally by 2030.
- ADIF is concerned that Google's Privacy Sandbox initiative, which removes third-party cookies from Chrome, could hinder non-Google Demand Side Platforms' effectiveness in digital advertising.
- The development comes as India discusses a digital competition law, which could lead to increased compliance by large tech companies. It also comes amid antitrust scrutiny into Google by the CCI, after fining it in 2022 for "abusing its market dominant position" in Android-related categories.
- India is proposing the Digital Competition Bill, 2024, which aims to curb anti-competitive practices by setting presumptive norms and imposing heavy penalties.
- The bill also addresses the role of Associate Digital Enterprises (ADEs) in regulating data use among group companies.