India: Issued fine in CCI investigation into Google over its play store policies

On 25 October 2022, the Competition Commission of India (CCI) announced it had imposed a penalty of INR 936.44, around EUR 114 million, on Google for its Play Store policies. According to the CCI, Google's Play Store is one of the main ways through which applications for the android system are distributed, and applications need to adjust their in-app payment systems to match Google Play's Billing System (GBPS). The CCI found that Google owns a dominant position in the market and has abused it by imposing GBPS on app developers and restricting access to other payment providers and therefore the app store altogether. Not only are app developers obliged to use Google's payment system for the distribution of applications, but also for in-app purchases. If app developers do not follow this obligation, they are not permitted to list their apps in the Google Play Store. However, the pre-installation of Google Pay-related programming interfaces was not found to be anti-competitive. The company is required to cease the self-preferencing practices that were found to violate the Competition Act and modify its practices within a certain timeframe in order to comply with the Competition Act in the future.