Payment policy: Google hits out at order; CCI steps in

NEW DELHI: The Delhi High Court on sought the stand of the Competition Commission of India and Alliance of Digital India Foundation (ADIF) on Google’s challenge to an order asking the regulator to look into the tech giant’s policy of allowing use of third-party payment processors for paid app downloads and in-app purchases on a commission basis.

A bench of Chief Justice Satish Chandra Sharma and Justice Subramonium Prasad issued notice on Google’s appeal against the single judge’s order, which asked the Commission to consider the plea of ADIF, an alliance of individuals and an industry representative body of innovative start-ups in the country, against the new billing system on or before April 26.

Senior advocate Sajan Poovayya, appearing for the appellant entity, said he was “not asking for an interim order” at this stage. “Issue notice,” said the bench. On Tuesday, the court had refused to grant urgent hearing to Google on the appeal on the same day. Google had mentioned the appeal before the bench for urgent listing, saying the Commission was scheduled to take up the matter in the afternoon itself pursuant to the order of the single-judge bench.

The ADIF had approached the single-judge earlier this month with the grievance that the anti-trust regulator had failed to act on its application objecting to Google’s new payment policy owing to a lack of quorum.

Google had opposed the petition before the single-judge bench on several grounds, including that since there were only two members and the chairperson was yet to be appointed, the Commission was incapable of adjudicating the application filed by the petitioner.

Justice Tushar Rao Gedela, in its 38-page order passed on Monday, noted that any vacancy or defect in the constitution of the Commission would not invalidate any proceedings so far as its adjudicatory powers are concerned and according to Additional Solicitor General N Venkataraman, the Commission was formed in accordance with the provisions of the Competition Act and was very much functional and carrying out adjudicatory functions.

New Delhi: Facing a tough competition from AI-powered Microsoft Bing, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai has announced to unlock the full potential of AI into its Search engine. Pichai said the company will unlock “entirely new experiences in Search and beyond” just as camera, voice and translation technologies have all opened entirely new categories of queries and exploration. “For years, we’ve been focused on making Search even more helpful, from Google Lens to multi-Search to visual exploration in Search, immersive view in Maps, Google Translate, to all the language models powering Search today, we have used AI to open up access to knowledge in powerful ways,” Pichai told analysts. He said that guided by data and years of experience about what people want, the company will test and iterate “as we go because we know that billions of people trust Google to provide the right information”. In March, Google introduced an experimental conversational AI service called Bard.