Google faces other nine-figure penalties after India’s antitrust commission said the firm misused the Play Store’s dominant position. Google was ordered to pay 9.36 billion rupees ($113.5 million) and to let Play Store developers utilize third-party payment systems for app and in-app purchases.
According to reports, the Competition Commission of India concluded after a long inquiry that Google’s demand for Play Store developers to adopt its payment system “constitutes an imposition of unreasonable conditions.” The regulator discovered that Google did not utilize the billing system for its own applications, which constituted “discriminatory circumstances.”
The agency has ordered Google to allow third-party payments in the Play Store within three months. It said that Google cannot impose any anti-steering measures on app developers and must not impede their ability to promote applications and services to customers. Similarly, the corporation cannot prevent consumers from using developers’ services and features.
According to the Competition Commission, Google must be completely upfront with Play Store developers and cannot impose any constraint on them that is “unfair, unjustified, discriminatory, or disproportionate to the services given to the app developers.” Furthermore, Google will be required to have a clear and transparent data-collecting strategy, and it would be prohibited from using “competitively relevant transaction/consumer data of applications created and acquired” through the Google Play Billing System to gain a competitive advantage.
Google has been assessed to have a dominating position in the areas of licensable smartphone operating systems, app stores, online searches, video hosting platforms, and “non-OS specific” mobile web browsers by the regulator. The Competition Commission penalized Google $161.9 million last week after determining that it exploited Android’s dominance. It said that smartphone manufacturers should not be required to preinstall Google’s applications and that the corporation should not withhold Play Services APIs as well as monetary and other incentives from third parties.
Google purportedly controls 97 percent of the smartphone market in India, and Google Play is one of the most popular payment providers. In terms of user counts, India is the company’s main market.
