NEW DELHI: India’s Competition Commission (CCI) dismissed a case against WhatsApp in which the messaging platform allegedly abused its market dominance to launch WhatsApp Pay in India.
The antitrust watchdog said WhatsApp Pay was available to “less than 1%” of WhatsApp users in India in its beta version, and that it is actually “yet to manifest in the market”.
The case against WhatsApp was brought by lawyer Harshita Chawla.
The ruling throws up a hurdle for the search of the Facebook-owned company to focus on the fintech ecosystem in India. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said after evaluating it in India, the company might look to carry payments to other countries. WhatsApp has over 400 million users in India which makes it its largest market.
Jio’s grocery delivery service, JioMart, is already allowing users to make orders through WhatsApp. With a payments service, the integration between the two platforms could be further improved.
While it dismissed the antitrust allegation, the regulator did observe that WhatsApp is indeed dominant in the over-the-top (OTT) messaging space. This might be important for future antitrust cases and rulings pertaining to the technology space.
“CCI said that while you may say this space is for user attention, it has its compartments. So you can’t substitute a Facebook, where you post content, with a WhatsApp, which is about live chats. That could make players cautious of their behaviour, because they could be dominant in their very small niches, so to speak,” said Kanika Chaudhary Nayar, Partner at L&L Partners.
