Supreme Court, on Friday, said it will begin the final hearings from October 10 on the cross-pleas of Google and Competition Commission of India (CCI) against the NCLAT order of March 29 in the Android case.
A Bench comprising Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud and Justices P S Narasimha and Manoj Mishra took up the appeals on Friday and said that it wanted “some time to get ready” with the case.
Senior advocate Harish Salve, appearing for Google, said that the plea may be taken up for the final hearing in September or October. Additional Solicitor General N Venkatraman appeared for the CCI.
The bench then said that the cross-pleas be listed for final disposal on October 10 and asked the parties to complete pleadings by October 3. Meanwhile, the apex court has issued notices to both Google and CCI while admitting their appeals.
The apex court also appointed lawyer Sameer Bansal as the nodal counsel for preparing common digital pleadings with the help of lawyers from both sides for easy adjudication of the matter.
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It maybe recalled that NCLAT had on March 29 substantially upheld the CCI’s Android order of October 20 last year, even while granting relief to the tech giant on four of the 10 non-monetary directions issued by the competition watchdog.
NCLAT also upheld the imposition of ₹ 1337.76 crore fine on tech giant by the Competition Commission of India (CCI).
Both Google and CCI had approached the Supreme Court in appeal against the NCLAT judgement. Infact, CCI’s appeal preceded Google’s appeal of NCLAT order in the Android matter.
The Supreme Court had on July 7 taken up the appeals and adjourned the hearing to July 14 in the wake on non availability of Senior Advocate Harish Salve.
The NCLAT had in its March 29 order given relief to Google in four key directions —Google need not share its proprietary application program interface (API) with third parties; Google can restrict the uninstallation of Google Suite apps on Android phones; Google was fair in sending warnings to users when they downloaded applications directly from the website of an unknown source, and Google was right in not permitting third party applications stores on its play stores to avoid malware.
In its appeal before SC, the CCI has contested the four remedies set aside by NCLAT, besides maintaining that a “provisional penalty” of ₹1,337 crore could not be confirmed as “final penalty” as Google did not give true financials.
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CCI also contended that Google cannot neither force OEMs of smart devices to preinstall its apps, nor restrict users from uninstalling such apps.
Google was also asked not to give any incentives to OEMs to help them comply with its conditions.
Google’s principal ground of appeal before SC is that the NCLAT failed to to “properly apply” the effects test to the CCI order in the matter.
Had NCLAT applied the effects test properly, it would have found that Google’s agreements were incapable of causing any anti-competitive effects, the tech giant submitted in its appeal filed with the Supreme Court recently.
Google has submitted to the apex court that NCLAT correctly held that an effects analysis is required to establish a contravention of Section 4 (abuse of dominance) of the Competition Act, but did not properly apply this test to the Commission’s Order.
On its part, CCI had in its appeal before the apex court contended that effects analysis is not required to be undertaken under the law.
