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With the crucial Google appeal coming up for hearing before Supreme Court on Wednesday, Indian start-ups have turned up the heat on Google by filing impleadment applications before Supreme Court to oppose the tech giant’s plea for an interim stay on the antitrust ruling of CCI in an Android matter.
MapmyIndia, a listed company and leading provider of digital maps, geospatial software, and location-based IoT technologies, is the latest to knock on the doors of the Supreme Court and has filed an impleadment application before the apex court on Monday after Google failed to get any immediate reprieve on its appeal against CCI ruling.
Earlier, OSlabs Technology — a direct competitor of Google in two verticals viz. app stores and mobile operating systems — also moved Supreme Court to oppose Google’s appeal.
OSlabs is an Indian, homebred, system apps company, and that has built an indigenous mobile app store (Indus App Bazaar) and also launched Indus OS, a modified (forked) version of the Android operating system.
“Google, owing to its dominance in the search engine market, also bundled Google Maps, and provides Google Maps widgets on top of any search in addition to a separate link for Google maps on every search. The links for other competitors such as the Applicant’s, are shown much lower in the list, and hence Google suppressed other better quality and more prominent Indian map links from MapmyIndia, or in fact, removed them from search results altogether,” said MapmyIndia in its application before Supreme Court.
It added, “Google has very systematically, through its various conducts, captured the market and deprived the market of from any competition whatsoever.”
MapmyIndia’s application details
MapmyIndia in its impleadment application also rued that “…after losing all the potential growth to Google due to its anti-competitive conduct, MapmyIndia has finally received a chance to revive its operations in the market since it can now compete on merits in a limited manner due to the remedies which have been passed by the CCI.”
The tech company added, “Google, through the instant appeal, is trying to take away even these remedies, which will significantly impact the Applicant.”
It is also pointed out that while the Applicant welcomes the remedies provided by the CCI, the Applicant being a competitor of Google and being aware of the market realities, is in a position to suggest additional remedies which would be “beneficial for maintaining and promoting the competition in the relevant market”.
Any attempt by the Appellant to delay the execution of relief given by the CCI or evade its liability would render the whole relief package by the CCI meaningless and would cause grave prejudice to the Applicant. Hence, the “Applicant is a ‘necessary party’ and/ or a ‘proper party’ in the instant Appeal”.
MapmyIndia has also prayed to the Supreme Court that it “must be heard at the admission hearing to ensure that there is no stay which may be granted to the impugned judgment of the CCI”.
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