Competition Commission rejects complaint against Wiley India

Fair trade regulator CCI has rejected allegations that Wiley India abused its dominant position by imposing unfair terms and conditions with regard to the subscription services on its agents.
Wiley India is a subsidiary of global publishing house John Wiley & Sons, and the complaint was also filed against it.
It was alleged that Wiley denied market access to the complainant and appointed its own subscription agents as authorised agents for distribution of its products.
Besides it was said that, the firm directed its agents to offer a maximum discount of 3 per cent to customers or else authorized agents would not accept order from unauthorized agents.

The complaint was filed by Prime Mag Subscription Services, a subscription agent.
Further, the complaint alleged that after appointing Prime as an authorised agent for one year, Wiley directed the authorised agents not to deal with it.

For this case, Competition Commission of India (CCI) considered "market for publishing of scientific, technical and medical (STM) academic journals in English Language in India," as the relevant market.
Noting that there are other leading players with significant market share, CCI said Wiley "does not appear to enjoy a dominant position in the relevant market".
With regard to anti-competitive practices by creating entry barriers, the watchdog noted "it is the prerogative of an enterprise to choose and decide its distribution channel and persons/entities it wants to deal with, unless it has appreciable adverse effect on competition in the market."

"The informant can also switch to other publishers. Hence, the restriction imposed by OPs (Wiley India and John Wiley) is unlikely to adversely affect the competition landscape in the distribution market of STM journal," CCI said.
Regarding restrictions on maximum discount to be offered, the regulator said it appears to be in the nature of resale price maintenance (RPM), as such directive fixes the lower limit of the price of journals.
"In view of the negligible market share of the OPs in the market of STM journal, the impact of such RPM would be limited and not likely to have any appreciable adverse effect on competition," CCI added.