India’s Attorney General Shri R. Venkataramani delivers Keynote address at 15th Annual Day commemoration of Competition Commission of India

In his address, Shri Venkataramani spoke about how the need for regulation of competition has travelled domains of prevention of unfairness in competition, to price determination and consumer welfare, and entering the age of common good as the determining factor.

Referring to the quote of Paul Samuelson that the markets can work but only with government created guardrails, Shri Venkataramani said such guardrails include competition regulation. The need is for coining new ideas of coexistence between the engine of free market and the umbrella of social benefit, Shri Venkataramani highlighted. The task of navigation between incentives and free riding of market ideas, will be a distinct legal innovation, distinct from other regulatory thoughts, he added.

Shri Venkataramani touched upon a few broad aspects such as the international convergence of competition laws and the take offs there from; the challenges to regulatory laws in general; the task of redistribution of economic power between consumers and suppliers and suppliers interse; the newly-emerging sustainability considerations and competition policy, as the business of sustainability will govern the sustainability of business, and new challenges in the light of digitalisation.  

With reference to digital markets, Shri Venkataramani said that the ongoing debate is one of ex-post action (investigation and sanctions) and the possibility of false negatives on the one hand versus an ex-ante action (bans and prohibitive rules) and the possibility of false positives on the other. The debate is also of casting a wide regulatory net, agnostic of the activity involved versus having more market specific regulations. To aid this, tools such as behavioural economics, that provide insight into human preferences, are useful, Shri Venkataramani added.

Shri Venkataramani further mentioned that given the existing framework of our competition law and the lessons learnt and to be learnt will need placing our debates a little beyond our domestic frontiers and at the same time to pursue our specific national matrices. Just as human innovations are dynamic so also market manoeuvres, the challenge is to have a basket of relevant empowering and synthesising principles.

Referring to the growing importance of privacy and data in the competition discourse, Shri Venkataramani said that establishing the contours of privacy from a competition perspective is important and suggested that it is imperative that a regulator always be keeping up with the times. Shri Venkataramani added that having detailed guidelines based on studies of the Indian market, will give the market players useful signposts as to the likely proscribed conduct. This would foster greater certainty, would empower smaller players, and caution larger ones on practices which are harmful to competition, he said.

The event was attended by a large number of dignitaries from the government, regulatory bodies, PSUs, industry, academia, chambers of commerce, and the legal fraternity.