CCI Investigates Antitrust Claims against Google Pay

The CCI has started an investigation against Google Pay (GPay) to check whether it has abused its dominance of India’s digital payments market. Executives at three payment firms aware of the discussions revealed this, as reported in Mint.

As a part of the probe, CCI is holding face-to-face interviews with payments firms, including PhonePe and Paytm Payments Bank, the executives said seeking anonymity.

The meeting will help CCI understand whether Google is giving users the choice to pay through other payment instruments in addition to GPay.

The investigation also aims to ascertain whether Google is leveraging user data on its platform to gain unfair advantage for its own payment platform. CCI will also see if the company has created restrictions for other payment firms to gain unfair advantage.

The watchdog will also check if Google is abiding by the government’s zero-merchant discount rate policy.

While CCI ordered investigation on GPay last November, a formal investigation began in January with the appointment of an additional director general to the antitrust case, said the executives cited above.

“CCI is still at a nascent point of the investigation and is trying to approach the matter from the perspective of app bundling with the Android OS, search manipulations where Google Pay appears on the top when a user searches for a payment use-case such as recharge on (Google search); and leveraging Google properties and data such as YouTube and Play Store to plant advertisements for its payment service, through ad personalization," said one of the three executives cited above, as per Mint.

Last July, Google denied the allegations in its response to CCI. The three executives said that Google’s 30 percent in-app commission is also being questioned in this particular investigation.

This is the third ongoing antitrust case against Google and its subsidiaries in India.