HC dismisses pleas by startups against Google billing policy
NEW DELHI : The Madras High Court on Thursday dismissed 14 of 16 petitions against Alphabet Inc.’s Google for its in-app payment billing policy on the Play Store mobile app marketplace. Responding to appeals by startups such as Bharat Matrimony, audiobook platform Pratilipi, and ed-tech platform Unacademy, the high court ruled that the issue falls under the jurisdiction of the Competition Commission of India (CCI), and as such, any decision taken by the antitrust watchdog will be binding upon all parties.
Appeals filed by Disney+ Hotstar and edtech platform Testbook are yet to be decided upon. Industry body Alliance of Digital India Foundation (ADIF), which led the appeals against Google’s Play Store’s billing policy, will appeal the high court decision to its division bench, said Ajay Data, secretary general of ADIF.
Startups who filed petitions against Google also confirmed plans to appeal the verdict. A senior executive at one of the companies said if Google Play’s billing policy is enforced in its present form, it will “make a very significant hit on our bottom lines." “It isn’t just about the financial hit—Google’s Play billing interface’s user experience design is detrimental to recurring subscriptions.
Internal experiments run by us have seen returns to subscriptions reduce 10x by using Google’s own billing system, versus our own custom-designed payment interface," the executive said. Another executive at a fellow appellant company said, “The 4% discount on third-party billing has no significance, since Google is anyway collecting 26% as its own platform fee, and any third-party vendor would still collect at least 2% as their usage fee.
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