New Delhi: Data privacy can take the form of non-price competition and abuse of dominance can lower privacy protection, a study conducted by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) has said.
The study also made observations about other non-price factors such as quality of service (QoS), data speeds and bundled offerings, which are likely to be the new drivers of competitive rivalry between service providers in telecom sector in addition to just price.
While reporting the findings and making its own observations, CCI noted that an aspect of data in the context of competition in digital communications market is the conflict between allowing access and protecting consumer privacy.
"Privacy can take the form of non-price competition," it said. Abuse of dominance can take the form of lowering the privacy protection and therefore fall within the ambit of antitrust as low privacy standard implies lack of consumer welfare.
Privacy degradation can lead to an objective detriment to consumers. Lower data protection can also lead to the standard legal category of exclusionary behaviour which undermines the competitive process, CCI noted in the report.
"Tying with other digital products will further strengthen the data advantage enjoyed by the dominant incumbent by cross-linking the data collected across services, creating a vicious circle," it said.
On other non-price factors of competition, CCI found that consumers ranked network coverage at the top followed by customer service, tariff packaging and lower tariffs as the most important factors for the preference of a particular network.
These responses suggest that competition has moved away from a unidimensional focus on price, as per the report.
"Much of the focus of the sector regulator, operators and consumers was on price and price-based competition. With the market moving towards data-based applications and services, there is a noticeable change in the demand for QoS," the report said.