[Samarth Saxena and Mohak Chikhale are Final Year students at ILS Law College, Pune] This post aims to critically analyse a constant conundrum in the Indian antitrust scenario, namely the relevant market analysis in the e-commerce sector. It does so in the context of the order (“Order”) of the Competition Commission of India (“CCI”) in All India Online Vendors Association (“AIOVA”) v. Flipkart...
Price Parallelism in Bid Rigging Arrangements
[Gunjan Garg is a 3rd year B.A LLB (Hons.) student of National Law Institute University, Bhopal] The Indian Competition Act in section 3 deals with ‘anti-competitive agreements’ which gives the Competition Commission of India (“CCI”) the power to prohibit any agreement between enterprises or persons engaged in identical or similar trade of goods and services, directly or indirectly resulting in...
Perceiving Data Protection within the Umbrella of Competition Law
[Vishal Singh is a III Year student at Dr. Ram Manohar Lohiya National Law University, Lucknow] The Competition Act, 2002 has been enacted to prevent activities that have an adverse effect on competition in the Indian Market. The Preamble of the Act unambiguously enunciates the role of ‘economic efficiency’ in competition law. The goal of competition law is to build a competitive market and thus...
Linde- Praxair Merger: Competition Assessment in the Industrial Gas Market
[Vaidehi Soni is a 4thYear B.A., LL.B. (Hons.) student at The National University of Advanced Legal Studies, Kochi] Background Linde Aktiengesellschaft (Linde) and Praxair, Inc. (Praxair), both international gasses and engineering companies primarily active in industrial gases, specialty gases, medical gases, related engineering and services sectors, entered into a business agreement wherein the...
Review of Indian Competition Law – Pointers
The Government of India has appointed a committee to review the Competition Act, 2002 to review the law and come up with recommendations to strengthen and re-calibrate the law. The Committee is expected to finish its work within three months of its first meeting. I wrote a column in the Business Standard earlier this week pointing out a few areas of low-hanging fruit that need attention. ...
Blockchain and Competition Law: New Technology, Old Challenges
[Swasti Gupta is a Research Associate at CUTS International, Jaipur] Overview The rapid emergence of “blockchain” in recent years has caused ripples in the global digital economy and has gripped the world’s attention. For those in search of a non-technical explanation, a blockchain is a decentralized, distributed ledger for transactions executed amongst the participants. It enables real-time...
Pricing Algorithms: How Should India Deal With It?
[Anik Bhaduri is a second-year B.A., LL.B (Hons.) student at NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad] The rapid development of the digital world often presents issues which could not have been contemplated before, thus presenting new challenges to the existing legal framework, which has to modify itself to deal with the new problems. The development of pricing algorithms presents one such issue. As...
The Quandary of Market Delineation under Section 3 of the Competition Act
[Ahkam Khan & Divyansh Prasad are 3rd Year BA LLB (Hons.) students at Dr Ram Manohar Lohiya National Law University, Lucknow] Antitrust laws aim at protecting and sustaining competition by preventing practices having appreciable adverse effects on competition (or AAEC). This competition necessarily exists in closed economic models or marketplaces. For the purposes of gauging whether a...
Resale Price Maintenance in the Online Retailing Era: Exploring an Alternative
[Divyansh Prasad is a 3rd Year BA LLB (Hons.) student from Dr Ram Manohar Lohiya National Law University, Lucknow] Section 3 of the Competition Act, 2002 proscribes any horizontal or vertical agreements that may have appreciable adverse effects on competition. Section 3(4)(e) specifically prohibits agreements between two or more enterprises operating at different levels of production which...
Settlements in Antitrust in India: The Right Road Ahead?
[Yash Bajpai is a 5th year B.B.A., LL.B. (Hons.) student at Symbiosis Law School in Hyderabad] Introduction The concept of settlements is not something new to the global anti-trust regime. It is a regulatory mechanism used worldwide for disposing off anti-trust matters; however, this still seems to be a far fetched dream in the Indian competition regime. Several jurisdictions across the world...
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