Deconstructing India’s Competition Law in the Context of the Indian E-retail Market: A Case of an Antitrust Paradox

Abstract

The paper tries to establish that the current concentrated structure of the Indian e-retail market- in terms of the bulk of the e-retail market being captured by two players namely, Flipkart and Amazon India- has been paradoxically aided by India’s antitrust law. This paper shows that the design of Section 4 of the Competition Act 2002 and its enforcement has played out in the Indian e-retail market in a manner, which has firstly, promoted concentration rather than (fair) competition and in doing so it has failed to capture the anticompetitive ramifications of some of the fundamental features of these online platforms, namely indirect network effects, vertically integrated structure and deep discounting funded by the access to deep pockets. Further, this paper also draws attention to the issues entailed in making predatory pricing behavior investigable only in the case of the ‘Abuse of Dominance’ by a firm. The paper does so by critically analyzing some of the CCI’s orders in the case of the Indian radio taxi services market.