CCI rejects plea accusing Google of sharing contact data with Truecaller

The Competition Commission of India (CCI) has dismissed a plea filed against tech giant Google which alleged that the tech giant abused its dominant position to favour Truecaller in the market.

The anti-trust regulator said that it found no evidence of violation of competition law in the case.

Rejecting the plea, the CCI in its order said, “Given the facts and circumstances of the present case, the Commission finds that no prima facie case of contravention of the provisions of Section 4 of the Act is made out against Google in the instant matter.”

Section 4 of the Competition Act, 2002, prevents big firms from abusing their dominant position in the market.

The commission in its observation noted that the allegation of the complainant was unsubstantiated and despite sufficient opportunity, the informant could not provide any evidence to prima facie establish that Google was giving preferential treatment to Truecaller.

“Based on the experiment run by the informant, it appears that users have voluntarily provided the contact details data to Truecaller. Therefore, the allegations of the informant that Truecaller is engaging in ‘unauthorised publishing’ or that Google has allowed any preferential access to Truecaller do not appear to be substantiated,” the CCI noted in its order.

The decision from the CCI came after a complaint was filed by Rachna Khaira, alleging that Google was granting exclusive access to Truecaller to share private contact information of the users with everyone while prohibiting other apps from doing the same.

“By doing this, Google is favouring Truecaller and distorting the market for caller ID and spam protection apps thereby providing a monopoly space to Truecaller,” read the submission.

Khaira further alleged that Google was giving preferential treatment to Truecaller because of their commercial arrangements wherein Truecaller is using Google’s cloud storage service and Google Ad service.