Inside the New Digital Competition Bill: What Tech Companies Must Prepare For

The Digital Competition Bill represents a structural reorientation of Indian antitrust enforcement. Where the Competition Act has historically operated on an ex-post basis, intervening after conduct has occurred, the Bill introduces a meaningful ex-ante layer. For technology platforms that meet the designated thresholds, that shift will require a recalibration of how corporate strategy and antitrust counsel work together.

The platforms most likely to be designated as Systemically Significant Digital Enterprises should be doing three things now. First, mapping their internal data flows between core and adjacent services with the rigour that a regulator would later apply. Second, building the documentary architecture to support legitimate business justifications for self-preferencing, tying, and bundling conduct. Third, ensuring that internal communications around platform design decisions are framed with the awareness that they may later become discoverable.

The drafting of the Bill borrows visibly from the European Digital Markets Act, and the early interpretive guidance from the Competition Commission is likely to track the European jurisprudence with selective adaptation. Indian counsel watching this space should be reading the European enforcement record alongside domestic developments.

For boards of designated platforms, the practical implication is significant. Decisions that were previously commercial discretion will now require contemporaneous documentation of competition reasoning. Product launches will need a competition review checkpoint integrated into the development cadence. Compliance teams will need direct lines to engineering, not merely to legal.

Our advisory practice has been working closely with technology clients to build out this internal architecture in advance of designation. The companies that do this work early will find that ex-ante compliance, properly architected, becomes a meaningful competitive moat. Those who wait will find themselves reacting to enforcement priorities rather than shaping their relationship with the regulator.