India Regulators Investigate Google Pay Antitrust Concerns

The Competition Commission of India (CCI) is looking into Google Pay to see if it has been abusing its dominance of the country’s digital payment markets, reported LiveMint.com on Monday (Feb. 22).

The information came from executives of three different payment firms, who were not identified in the report.

The CCI began conducting interviews with rival payment companies, including PhonePe and Paytm Payments Bank, according to the anonymous executives. The point of the meetings is to try and understand if Google has given customers the option to pay with other options beyond GPay.

The CCI, the report said, will work to ascertain whether the tech giant has been leveraging user data to gain an unfair advantage over competitors. The investigation will also look into whether Google was creating restrictions for other payment firms which in turn gave Google more of a leg up.

CCI also plans to check into whether or not Google is abiding by the government’s rules on zero-merchant discount rates (MDR).

One of the executives, according to LiveMint, said CCI was “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 [the] Play Store to plant advertisements for its payment service, through ad personalization.”

The CCI’s investigation actually began months ago and initial concerns were with how Google Pay was promoted when the phones were being set up, and in general, how much choice phone companies had.

Google seems to have taken cues from Apple in that it requires developers to use its payment system and in-app billing system to charge users along with paying commission fees for using the app store.