Play Store delisting: Global behemoths endangering Make in India, says COAI

While targeting Indian companies, large traffic generators are refusing to pay fair share charges, says COAI

The Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) on Tuesday said that international giants are prepared to oust indigenous Indian companies for financial gains. The remark was indirectly aimed at Google’s decision to remove Indian startups and apps from its Play Store. Without naming Google directly, COAI implied that the tech giant is itself one of the Large Traffic Generators (LTG) opposing the COAI’s proposed fair share charge (FSC).

Google and Indian application (app) developers have been at odds ever since the search giant banned apps from 10 developers on its Play Store. However, many of these apps were reinstated within a day. Stepping into the fray, COAI said that app stores make significant revenues from developers and app users, as well as through data monetisation and advertising, among other revenue streams.

The industry body said this is evidently against the spirit of the government’s flagship ‘Make in India’ program as well as the progressive approach to foster innovation and encourage small organisations.

“It is surprising that these LTGs, which are generally global corporates based in foreign countries, are ready to evict non-paying small businesses as they expect the ‘immense value’ that their platform provides to the apps, themselves prefer to enjoy a free-ride over the TSPs’ networks, while profiting heavily from them,”  said SP Kochhar, Director General, COAI.

LTGs have till now strongly opposed the proposal for a fair-share contribution to the TSPs for carrying their disproportionately large traffic and provisioning the increasingly demanding infrastructure required to deliver so, he added.

As the representative body for the three private sector telecos, COAI wants LTGs to bear the additional capital expenditure incurred by telecom service providers (TSPs) to enhance the network infrastructure needed to support rising traffic. The enhanced data traffic is costing the telcos up to Rs 10,000 crore annually, the COAI said.

However, the LTGs argue that smaller players, startups, and MSMEs that generate low traffic would be exempted from the fair-share charge. Instead, only the top 4-5 LTGs, which generate substantial volumes of traffic, would have to contribute the fair-share charge to share in the rising network costs.