Hyderabad: The Competition Commission's recent penalty of Rs 1,337.76 crore on Google for allegedly abusing its dominant position in multiple markets in relation to Android mobile devices has highlighted the role of three Indians behind the CCI's move.
The CCI, which had started probing the case in April 2019, has directed that Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) should not be restrained from choosing from amongst Google's proprietary applications to be pre-installed and also not be forced to pre-install other applications on their smart devices.
In the run-up to the CCI probe, Sukarma Thapar, a young tech enthusiast from Delhi, noticed in 2018 that there are some default apps that are ready to use when we buy Android phones and they cannot be deleted by us. Like it or not, they are on our phones even as we have no way of knowing if there is a better alternative.
Also read: Competition Comm slaps Rs 1,337.76 crore fine on Google
This led Sukarma to infer that this is happening because of Google's monopoly in the market. Sukarma along with another research assistant Umar Javed --both working at the CCI as researcH assistants at the time -- and Umar's younger brother Aqib, who was a Law student at the University of Kashmir at the time, submitted the information to the CCI which formed the basis of the October 20 order of the tech regulator penalizing Google.
"I had to work hard. In 2018, the European Commission imposed a huge fine on Google. After that, I found a way in this matter. I used to work all day and spend the rest of the time searching for clues. Sleeping late, getting up before dawn, and doing the same thing again. That's when I came to know about a study done by a Harvard professor on Google contracts.
We use Android in India. However, when compared with the data, some clues were found. So we were able to hand over what we found to CCI and fine Google," said Sukarma, who completed her LLM at Nalsar University
The three were motivated by one of the largest fines of 4.34 billion Euros by the European Commission on Google for violating EU antitrust rules in July 2018. This made the researchers look for a similar case against Google. However, due to the limited information related to the Android ecosystem in the public domain, it was left for the CCI itself to dig deep to establish Google's monopoly in the tech market for which the trio gave credit to the regulator.
“People say I should not have taken on such a big company. I don't get any money for this. But not everything is done for money. I believe that our education should also have a social purpose. It is enough if the users benefit because of this,” said Sukarma.
