Govt To Table New Bill For Tackling Anticompetitive Conduct In Digital Space

With emerging challenges in the digital economy, the government is soon bringing a new law for players like Amazon, Google and Facebook in the space to check anticompetitive practices.

An experts’ panel set up by the corporate affairs ministry to explore the need for such a law is set to give its report, two people familiar with the development told Mint, proposing a new legislation as well as a draft bill.

The bill aims to ensure that search engines, marketplaces and social media platforms act in a fair manner. It is unlikely to be tabled before the elections because the last Parliament session of the current Lok Sabha – the budget session from January 31 to February 9 – is a short one that would focus on issues of wider public interest rather than complex, niche economic legislation.

Once the report is submitted, the ministry will seek public feedback on the matter, the report added.

In August last year, Union Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said that the digital economy is set to contribute over 20% to India’s total gross domestic product (GDP) by 2026.

It is pertinent to note that India has taken significant strides towards bringing digitalisation across sectors. Be it the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) that transformed the fintech ecosystem or the launch of several AI-backed initiatives, the steps taken by the government have helped the country’s tech ecosystem leapfrog.

The country has also opened India Stack, a set of digital public goods, to other countries, enabling cross-border payments and more.

In 2022, the parliamentary standing committee on finance led by the Jayant Sinha proposed an ex-ante regulatory framework involving a set of do’s and don’ts for systemically important digital economy firms, as opposed to the existing approach of taking action after a violation is committed.

The panel recommended that the handful of big tech firms to be identified as digital market gatekeepers must play by certain rules and file annual compliance reports. 

Following the panel’s recommendations, the expert committee was formed last year and given the mandate to decide whether existing competition law and regulations were sufficient to deal with competition-related challenges in the digital economy or whether a separate regime was needed. 

Two other bills – amendments to the Bankruptcy Code and the Companies Act – may also make it to Parliament only after the elections.

Note: We at Inc42 take our ethics very seriously. More information about it can be found here.