On February 6, this year, the Indian government set up a Committee on Digital Competition Law (CDCL) to examine the need for a separate law on competition in digital markets. This committee was tasked with studying whether India needed ex-ante regulations that would preemptively prevent larger e-commerce platforms and digital markets from engaging in conduct that hinders market competition. As of May, the CDCL is yet to submit its report on the issue and there has been an ongoing conversation around the idea of ex-ante regulation. “If you want to protect consumers, I personally believe that the way to do that is through the Consumer Protection Act. If you have security concerns, then perhaps, The IT Act or the Digital India Act is the way to go, right? With marketplaces, it becomes a bit tricky because you're trying to balance all of these factors,” said Shruti Aji Murali, legal counsel at Axiom5 Law Chambers, joining this conversation during the “Regulating Marketplaces: E-commerce and App Stores” panel at MediaNama’s MarketsNama conference last Friday. FREE READ of the day by MediaNama: Click here to sign-up for our daily newsletter with the top story of the day delivered daily before 9 AM in your inbox. Pre-establishes obligation One of the panelists, Abir Roy, the co-founder of Sarvada Legal and a competition law expert, says that the reasoning behind ex-ante regulations is that investigations take time, and there is a possibility that by the time some decision is made on competition-related issues, it is…
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