Winning Bizness Desk

Mumbai. Bad news for Google. The National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) on Wednesday upheld the Rs 1337.76 crore fine imposed on Google. The Competition Commission of India (CCI) had last year, on October 20, imposed a fine of ₹ 1,337.76 crore on Google for anti-competitive practices in relation to Android mobile devices. The regulator also ordered the Internet major to stop indulging in various unfair business practices. NCLAT has given 30 days time to pay the fine and implement the order. A two-member bench of the NCLAT said that the CCI probe was not in violation of the principles of natural justice. She will not accept the argument that the CCI order on Google is biased.

Why was the fine imposed?

Google had put pressure on every app published on its Play Store to process every payment related to the app only through Google-Pay, Google's payment platform. This should be done through every In-app Purchase Google-Pay. App publishers objected to this. CCI also agreed that this pressure is wrong. Due to this, app publishers are not able to tie-up with other payment platforms despite getting better deals. Also, it was considered as a means of suppressing the rest of the payment platforms wrongly and creating a monopoly in the market. Apart from this, Google's Android mobile operating system is the most used mobile OS in the world. Google had forced phone makers to include Google's apps (Google Search, YouTube, Chrome etc.) as default in every new phone. They would have been allowed to use Android on this condition. CCI considered this also wrong. This was creating a monopoly of Google's apps on Android phones. For companies like Samsung who also give their search engines to the users, this condition was increasing the difficulties.