This is because post-integration, a customer cannot access one product without necessarily acquiring the other product. The case of the complainant was that integration of WPay into Whatsapp resulted in tying of the products. Firstly, that the element of coercion in purchasing and using the two products together was absent and secondly, because the entry of WPay is not capable of foreclosing competition in the payment services market. The CCI held that Whatsapp’s practice of integrating WPay into Whatsapp messenger did not constitute tying on two grounds. the tying is capable of restricting/foreclosing competition in the market.the entity concerned is dominant in the market for the tying product.the tying and tied products are two separate products.The economic literature, along with the decisions of antitrust authorities, has laid down certain conditions which need to be fulfilled to conclude a case of tying. Under Indian jurisprudence, ‘tying’ refers to a practice whereby the seller of a product or service requires the buyers to also purchase another separate product or service (‘tied product’). Its proposed model of integrating these two apps will give it an instant consumer exposure to half a billion users, thereby allowing it to use its dominance in one market to penetrate into another market by tying these two applications. Whatsapp is the leading player in the smartphone-based OTT messaging service market in India with a massive userbase of 500 million users. (‘Whatsapp’) released its UPI based payment feature named Whatsapp Pay which received regulatory approval by National Payments Corporation of India (‘NPCI’) in February 2020. In an attempt to capitalize on this growth, Whatsapp Inc. To contextualise, the value of the digital payments market, which was $65 bn in 2019 is expected to grow at a CAGR of 20% reaching approximately $140 bn by 2023. The adoption and implementation of Unified Payments Interface (‘UPI’), a government-regulated real-time digital payment technology is credited as a significant driver of this growth. India is, currently, the fastest growing FinTech market in the world. Moreover, its determination of market foreclosure is also problematic since it presupposes it on real and actual harm. In reaching such a conclusion the Competition Commission of India (‘CCI’) erred in applying the same standard of the requirement of ‘coercion’, as is for brick-and-mortar entities, for digital markets. The antitrust watchdog of India recently in Harshita Chawla v Whatsapp and Facebook held that Whatsapp’s proposed model of integrating its payments app called ‘Whatsapp Pay’ (‘WPay’) within its messaging app is not anti-competitive since it does not constitute ‘tying in’ due to lack of coercion.
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