India's answer to the EU's Digital Markets Act has been "almost ready" for over two years now. This month, the government ordered yet another market study before deciding how the law should actually work — its second major reset. We think that's frustrating for anyone waiting on clarity, and also, on balance, the right call.
The Digital Competition Bill traces back to a March 2024 report from a government-appointed committee, proposing an ex-ante regulatory framework — meaning it would impose proactive compliance obligations on large digital platforms before any anti-competitive conduct occurs, rather than the Competition Act's existing ex-post approach, which only steps in after harm is identified. The idea, modelled loosely on the EU's Digital Markets Act, was to designate a small set of "Systemically Significant Digital Enterprises" — SSDEs — in areas like search, app stores, operating systems, and browsers, and hold them to conduct rules from day one: restrictions on self-preferencing, mandatory interoperability, limits on combining user data across a company's own services.
What Just Happened, and Why
The Ministry of Corporate Affairs has now ordered a fresh market study, specifically covering the quantitative and qualitative thresholds that would determine which companies actually get designated as SSDEs, and which specific services count as "Core Digital Services" subject to the regime. In effect, the government is saying it wants empirical evidence before locking in exactly who the law applies to — a genuinely fair question, since the original draft's proposed thresholds (a turnover of Rs 4,000 crore, or global market capitalisation of USD 75 billion, among other criteria) were criticised by multiple stakeholders as either too broad, potentially catching large Indian platforms that don't actually behave like global gatekeepers, or too narrow, missing genuinely dominant players operating just below the line.
The Case for Moving Slowly Here, Genuinely
We think there's a real, substantive case for this delay rather than reading it purely as bureaucratic drift. Ex-ante regulation, by design, applies obligations to a company before any actual harm has been proven — which means getting the threshold wrong in either direction has real cost. Set it too broad, and you burden genuinely competitive Indian platforms — some of them exactly the kind of homegrown digital businesses that policy elsewhere claims to want to nurture — with EU-style compliance obligations designed for a handful of global gatekeepers. Set it too narrow, and the law simply misses its target while creating an illusion of oversight. The EU's own Digital Markets Act enforcement experience, still working through its own definitional disputes years after passage, is a live cautionary tale that getting this specific piece right matters more than getting it fast.
Who Should Actually Be Paying Attention Right Now
This isn't only a large-platform story. Indian D2C brands, sellers, and service providers who operate primarily through a small number of dominant marketplaces, app stores, or ad platforms have a direct stake in how this Bill eventually defines "self-preferencing" and mandatory interoperability, since those provisions are specifically designed to address exactly the kind of platform dependency many smaller Indian businesses currently navigate without much recourse. If your business has ever felt structurally disadvantaged by a marketplace's own algorithm, ranking system, or in-house competing product, this is the legislation that would eventually give you a formal complaints mechanism against that — and it's worth tracking the market study's outcome rather than assuming this Bill remains a distant, Big Tech-only story.
Our honest expectation: given the pattern of two resets in two years, a further delay into 2027 before a genuinely finalised Bill reaches Parliament wouldn't surprise us — and given the stakes of getting the definitional thresholds right, we don't think that delay is necessarily a policy failure.