Indian startups struggle to compete with global big tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, due to their vast resources and control of data, said Ansuman Pattnaik, director general, Competition Commission of India (CII), the country’s anti-trust body.
“Startups do face problems with the big digital firms, popularly called GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft) and now NVIDIA. It is because these firms are pretty powerful and have rich resources and data. Against them, startups sometimes find difficulty in growing,” said Pattnaik.
He was speaking at a panel on the theme, ‘Regulatory Landscape for Startups: Balancing Compliance and Growth’, at the Startup Mahakumbh on Saturday.
Delving into the specific concerns, Pattnaik said that emerging startups do not get equal access to the market.
“The major challenges are like self-references as they (big-tech firms) promote their products rather than the products of startups. They do anti-steering, not allowing startups to talk to them directly. They can also do what is called market access. There are issues of platform neutrality also,” he said, pointing out price fixing as one of the challenges homegrown startups face.
The competition policies need to be robust for startups to grow, Pattnaik added.
Assuring the startup founders, Pattnaik said if their companies face such concerns, they should feel comfortable coming forward and filing a complaint before the commission. “We do market corrections. If the startups find that they are getting a short slip from a big firm, and their business processes have been hindered, they can file a complaint before the commission and we will take up the case. A couple of cases have recently helped startups,” he said.
Referring to the case of Google and messaging firm WhatsApp, Pattnaik said, “Google was not allowing alternate payment processes through their app, now they have been allowed. Recently, we also passed an order against Meta. WhatsApp was taking the data of all the consumers and businesses and sharing it with the principal firm, Meta. There was no opt-out process. Against those orders, some interesting decisions have been filed which are going to help startups.”
In its ruling in March 2025, the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) reiterated that Google had abused its dominant market position by imposing unfair conditions on app developers. However, the tribunal slashed the fine imposed on Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, from Rs 936.44 crore to Rs 216.69 crore.
Similarly, in the case of WhatsApp, the CCI imposed a penalty of Rs 213 crore on Meta over WhatsApp’s data-sharing policy. It also prohibited WhatsApp from sharing user data with Meta unless users were given an opt-out option. The NCLAT has postponed the hearing of the case for now.
Pattnaik said that penalties in such cases can be significantly high, amounting to 10 per cent of the global turnover of a company.