The ruling comes after a 10-week trial and is a major victory for the US Justice Department, which filed the lawsuit nearly four years ago.

An Antitrust Complaint Against Google

• An Indian start-up lobby group has filed a complaint with the Competition Commission of India (CCI) against Google’s alleged anticompetitive practices in the online advertising market, marking the tense relationship and increasing tussle between the country’s new-age firms and tech giants.
• The Alliance of Digital India Foundation (ADIF), in a statement, said that Google’s dominance over major online platforms and its reliance on advertising for the majority of its revenue hinders competition and negatively impacts Indian businesses.
• The development comes as India is currently discussing an exhaustive digital competition law, which could see increased preemptive compliance on the part of large tech companies. 
• It also comes amid increasing antitrust scrutiny into Google by the CCI, after having fined it in 2022 for “abusing its market dominant position” in multiple categories related to the Android mobile device ecosystem in the country.
• “ADIF contends that Google’s control over major online platforms, coupled with the fact that it derives 97 per cent of its revenue from advertising, has led to practices that stifle competition and adversely affect Indian businesses,” the organisation’s statement said.
• Google’s ad-ranking system includes advertisers to set a bid for the amount of money they want to spend on a particular advertisement. 
• This is the maximum amount an advertiser has to shell out to Google, when a person clicks on their advertisement.
• The organisation has also accused Google of self-preferencing its own services over other similar offerings, which restricts market access for competitors and negatively impacts start-ups that rely on these services.
• “ADIF is particularly concerned over Google’s Privacy Sandbox initiative, which aims to remove third-party cookies from websites accessed via the Google Chrome browser. 
• This move could significantly hamper non-Google Demand Side Platforms’ ability to serve advertisers effectively,” it said.

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Conclusion

The ADIF’s complaint highlights growing concerns over Google’s market dominance and potential anti-competitive practices, underscoring the need for stringent digital competition regulations in India.

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