Digital competition Bill based on standing committee report: Sinha

Jayant Sinha, member of Parliament in the Lok Sabha and chairman of the Standing Committee on Finance, said the private member’s Bill on digital competition that proposes to table will include all the provisions suggested by the committee in its report on anti-competitive practices by big tech companies.

“The Bill will be completely modelled on the digital competition report. Everything we have said in the report is in the Bill — identifying systemically important digital intermediaries (SIDIs), making sure that they are compliant with the 10 anti-competitive practices, and they should file an annual report,” Sinha said.

The parliamentary panel on finance, chaired by Sinha, presented a report in December identifying 10 anti-competitive practices in digital markets and a need for ex-ante regulations to address them. The committee also called upon the government to come up with a definition for SIDIs that need tighter regulations. The classification could be done based on revenues, market capitalisation, and the number of active users, the panel suggested.

Sinha said he worked on the Bill alongside the report on anti-competitive practices by big tech companies, which took a year to research. The Bill is another input for the government to deliberate on and will be tabled soon, he added.

“We put together our digital competition report in December. That’s when I also put together this (Bill) as a helpful companion to it and that’s when we submitted it to the Lok Sabha. The idea of this was always just to provide helpful input to the government to think about how such a Bill could be put together,” Sinha said.

The Ministry of Corporate Affairs in February set up a 16-member committee of Union secretaries, law experts, and industry stakeholders to draft within three months the Digital Competition Bill after studying anti-competitive practices. Sinha said his Bill would be helpful as it was drafted based on the standing committee’s “elaborate and thorough” examination of such legislation around the world.

Technology behemoths such as Alphabet (which owns Google), Meta (which owns Facebook), and Amazon are among those recognised the world over as Big Tech companies that act as crucial digital intermediaries. The panel said a top tech company must not “favour its offers over the offers of its competitors” when acting as a mediator.

The standing committee’s report was based on interactions with Indian representatives of big tech companies and representatives of domestic companies like Paytm, MakeMyTrip, Zomato, Ola, Swiggy, Flipkart, etc.