Competition Commission of India (CCI) has dismissed a case accusing WhatsApp of abusing its market dominance in the payment space.
The antitrust case claimed that the Facebook-owned app would be able to misuse data to their commercial advantage, causing adverse effect on the competition.
However, the CCI dismissed the case.
“The commission observes that Facebook and WhatsApp undeniably deal with customer sensitive data which is amenable to misuse and may raise potential antitrust concerns among other data protection issues,” the regulator said. “However, in the present case, the informant has only alleged that WhatsApp/Facebook have access to data which they are using for doing targeted advertising.
“There is neither any concrete allegation, nor any specific information to support the competition concern of the informant. In the absence thereof, there is nothing on record which the commission can examine.”
WhatsApp’s payment services in India are still in beta and are limited to less than 1% of the customers in the country.
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