India’s Digital Competition Bill: Better alternatives exist

livemint.com:

Countries around the world are looking for ways in which to address the challenge of competition in the digital world. In America, there are a number of bills before the US Congress seeking to provide legislative avenues through which this problem can be tackled. Both the US Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission have initiated a number of high profile antitrust lawsuits against Big Tech companies.

Europe has already enacted two significant legislations—the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act—and has, if anything, further ramped up its enforcement actions against Big Tech. While India is undoubtedly late to the party, it has recently initiated a consultation on a new draft legislation that aims to remedy this. In its recitals, the draft Digital Competition Bill states that it will identify systemically significant digital enterprises (SSDEs) and regulate the core digital services that they provide.

And that it is being enacted to foster innovation, promote competition and protect the interests of users in India. Once in force, it will offer regulators new tools with which to tackle digital competition. In actual fact, this is a legislation based on the misbegotten notion that ‘Big is always bad.’ By making SSDEs the sole target of new regulation, it will likely put at risk much of the progress that India has achieved in the digital sphere through decades of permission-less digital innovation because of its underlying presumption that all companies in the digital sphere above a given size must be anticompetitive.