For most of its existence, the Competition Act, 2002 assessed whether a merger required approval from the Competition Commission of India (CCI) using two numbers: the combined assets and the combined turnover of the parties. This worked reasonably well for traditional industries, where market power tracked revenue fairly closely. It worked far less well for the digital economy, where a startup can hold enormous strategic value — and enormous quantities of user data — while generating almost no revenue at all.
The Gap the Old Test Missed
The clearest illustration was not even an Indian deal: Facebook's 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp, a company with negligible revenue at the time, cleared merger review in most jurisdictions without meaningful scrutiny, precisely because asset and turnover thresholds weren't built to capture that kind of transaction. Regulators globally began asking the same question — how do you assess a deal's competitive effect when the target's value lies in its user base, its data, or its potential to become a competitor, rather than in its current financials?
India's Response
The Competition (Amendment) Act, 2023 introduced a deal value threshold: transactions exceeding ₹2,000 crore now require CCI notification if the target has "substantial business operations in India," regardless of how small its turnover or asset base looks on paper. This brought India in line with jurisdictions like Germany and Austria, which had already introduced similar transaction-value tests specifically to catch "killer acquisitions" — deals structured to absorb potential future competitors before they mature into real rivals.
The amendment also compressed the CCI's review timeline from 210 days to 150 days, a change aimed at reducing the deal uncertainty that had made India a comparatively slow jurisdiction for merger clearance among major economies.
Why This Matters Beyond Big Tech
While the deal value threshold is framed around digital markets, its reach extends further. Pharmaceutical licensing deals, media and OTT platform acquisitions, and fintech consolidation have all become areas where the CCI is now expected to look past headline revenue figures and examine the strategic logic of a transaction more closely. The CCI's own market studies on e-commerce and app store practices — conducted independently of specific merger reviews — signal a regulator building institutional expertise in digital market dynamics ahead of the cases it expects to see.
The Enforcement Side
Merger control is only half the picture. On the conduct side, the CCI's investigations into app store commission structures and platform self-preferencing echo similar cases brought by the European Commission and the U.S. FTC, though Indian enforcement has generally moved more cautiously and with narrower remedies to date. How aggressively the CCI uses its expanded toolkit — including the amendment's new provisions on hub-and-spoke cartels and settlement/commitment mechanisms — will likely be the more consequential story over the next few years.
Why This Matters for Students
Competition law was, for a long time, a niche practice area in India, dominated by a small set of specialist firms. The digital economy's growth has pulled it toward the centre of corporate and regulatory practice — M&A lawyers now need working fluency in merger control triggers, and litigators are finding competition law disputes increasingly intersect with data protection and consumer law. It is one of the more interdisciplinary fields to build early expertise in.