India’s Big Tech regulation dilemma: The world’s most powerful technology companies are no longer just market leaders. They are infrastructural behemoths, sovereign-like platforms, and informational monopolies that shape economic behaviour, influence public opinion, and increasingly determine the boundaries of democratic engagement. For more than a decade, the likes of Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Amazon have operated with minimal oversight, shielded by the language of innovation and the inevitability of scale. That era, however, is drawing to a close.
Across jurisdictions, the once-untouchables of Silicon Valley are now squarely in the crosshairs of regulators and competition authorities. But whether they will be meaningfully held to account is a question that remains far from settled.
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EU’s regulatory assertiveness
The scale was tolerated—often celebrated—so long as innovation, convenience and growth were delivered. That compact has now ruptured. Across the Atlantic, the European Union has led the charge, invoking antitrust laws with a consistency and clarity that many other jurisdictions have struggled to match. This March, the EU hit Google with two fresh charges under its new Digital Markets Act, targeting self-preferencing in search results and opaque ad-tech practices.
Apple too has been told to open up access to its operating systems, with billions in fines levied and more proceedings on the horizon. These actions are expressions of European political will, a signal that the age of digital exceptionalism—where platforms grew without checks or responsibilities—is being dismantled.
Washington’s quiet reprisal
Yet even in Brussels, the road ahead is far from assured. The recent shifts in Washington, following last year’s presidential elections, have made clear that the United States remains deeply protective of its technology champions. The current administration has shown little appetite for supporting or even tolerating regulatory action abroad that affects American tech firms.
The European Union’s antitrust agenda, no matter how principled, risks becoming collateral in a wider confrontation where digital regulation is framed as an assault on American commercial leadership. For all its legislative muscle, the EU may soon find itself up against coordinated political and economic pressure from a US establishment that sees Big Tech as an extension of national power.
India’s inescapable dependency
India’s dilemma is even more fraught. Big Tech today is deeply embedded in India’s digital fabric. Millions depend on Google’s ecosystem for daily functionality, from search to maps to payments. WhatsApp is India’s default messaging protocol, not merely a social app. Amazon and Apple are central to e-commerce and premium digital consumption, while Meta, through Facebook and Instagram, plays an outsized role in content, influence, and electoral discourse.
This intermeshing of platform and polity makes disentanglement complicated, and any punitive action, especially on grounds of market abuse, risks blowback not just from corporate boardrooms but from Washington itself. The American political apparatus has historically closed ranks when its tech companies are challenged abroad, and the current leadership is no exception.
Weak links in domestic oversight
Even before India must deal with foreign pushback, it must confront a domestic shortcoming: whether our own regulatory institutions are intellectually and structurally prepared to supervise Big Tech. Most of our current regulatory capacity is rooted in old-economy models—built for commodities, infrastructure, or banking—and has yet to be updated for the fast-mutating architecture of digital ecosystems.
Tech platforms operate across layers: infrastructure, software, data, advertising, payments, and now intelligence. Regulating such entities demands a hybrid understanding of technology, economics, and network behaviour—capabilities that are not yet visible in India’s enforcement bodies. Without this leap, regulation will remain reactive, easily gamed by compliance theatre and legal evasion.
Courts struggle to keep pace
The judiciary presents another challenge. India’s legal system has little precedent in navigating the intersection of evolving technology and outdated statutes. Many of the legal principles governing digital behaviour are still under stress-testing, while procedural timelines stretch into years. The larger question is whether Indian courts can adjudicate these matters with the urgency, comprehension and nuance they demand.
Can courts grasp the competitive harms of algorithmic bias or the risks of AI monopoly before irreparable market damage occurs? Can they distinguish between technical compliance and actual structural reform? Most importantly, can they deliver time-bound remedies, rather than letting cases drag on into irrelevance while the platform economy continues to evolve faster than the legal process?
A global problem of asymmetry
Of course, there is near-universal political consensus across capitals, globally, that Big Tech must be regulated. Yet the competence gap within most governments and policy institutions when it comes to supervising these sprawling digital empires remains stark. The asymmetry is not just technical but financial—Big Tech firms have the muscle to fight regulatory wars endlessly, tying up cases in litigation while continuing to reshape markets in real time.
Beneath the rhetoric lies a quieter truth: governments themselves are now deeply dependent on these very platforms. From e-governance infrastructure to digital payments, public service delivery increasingly rides on private tech rails.
At the same time, political actors rely on these platforms as indispensable tools of mass mobilisation and electoral communication. This entanglement creates a fundamental conflict of interest—where the state must simultaneously regulate and rely on the same entities, often blurring the lines between public oversight and private partnership.
Risk of regulatory capture
This dependency has bred a deeper, more insidious problem—regulatory capture. It is not always overt, but it is everywhere. Across the bureaucratic apparatus, within political corridors, even inside regulatory bodies and legal forums, the influence of Big Tech is subtly but firmly entrenched.
Senior officials rotate into advisory roles, legal experts are co-opted into endless arbitration, and political actors find themselves constrained by the very platforms they must oversee. The language of innovation and ease-of-doing-business is often used to mask inertia, while public institutions quietly internalise the interests of the private platforms they are meant to discipline.
Sovereignty in the AI era
Any meaningful action against a Big Tech firm is almost certain to trigger a cascade of consequences that far exceed the matter at hand. The United States has repeatedly demonstrated that it views its technology companies not merely as commercial actors but as strategic assets, to be defended with the full weight of its diplomatic and trade machinery. Even measured regulatory steps have in the past invited retaliatory rhetoric, punitive tariffs, and policy sabre-rattling under the guise of protecting innovation and free enterprise.
This reflexive defence, often disproportionate and untethered from the facts, signals that any regulatory assertion—however legitimate—will be interpreted as geopolitical affront rather than economic housekeeping. India must therefore prepare not only for a legal battle, but for the broader political choreography that such a step inevitably provokes.
To act against Big Tech is to invite a contest that is as much diplomatically tough as it is legal. It demands political courage, not merely bureaucratic alertness. Regulatory agencies can investigate and fine, but the true enforcement lies in the ability of a nation-state to hold its ground in the face of concerted lobbying, backchannel pressure, and public narrative warfare. India must see it as a strategic reset, where digital sovereignty, competitive fairness, and public interest are negotiated alongside trade partnerships and global alliances.
This is precisely why regulating Big Tech cannot be left to competition authorities alone. It requires high-level political leadership, executive resolve, and a coherent national strategy that balances economic openness with institutional control. It is also why any such action must be pre-emptively framed not as anti-investment, but as pro-competition, pro-democracy, and pro-sovereignty.
Even then, the road ahead is not without risk. These companies are deeply embedded in the everyday operations of businesses, consumers, and governments alike. Their services are sticky, their networks entrenched, and their retaliation capabilities real. Removing their gatekeeping power is not just a legal operation—it is a systems intervention. The consequences, intended or not, will ripple across sectors. Disruption is inevitable. That is the cost of structural correction.
At the same time, inaction is not a neutral option. The rise of generative AI and the massive concentration of capital and infrastructure behind it—predominantly within a handful of Western firms—has convinced regulators worldwide that the moment to act is now. Left unchecked, the same firms that control the flow of information will control the cognitive and economic architecture of the AI future.
India taking baby steps
India has taken first steps: digital competition laws are under review, and certain policy nudges have been introduced. But the time for signalling is over. What lies ahead is a more difficult task—designing laws that can tame ecosystems without paralysing innovation, applying penalties that correct without fracturing, and building local capacity to offer viable alternatives. For this, India must draw from Europe’s regulatory clarity, but also anticipate its own geopolitical constraints.
There is no easy formula. But there is a clear imperative. A market the size of India cannot remain structurally dependent on unaccountable transnational platforms. Nor can it afford to subcontract critical infrastructure—communications, cloud, payments, retail discovery—to firms whose core accountability lies outside its democratic reach. To regulate Big Tech is to assert sovereign competence. And that is a political decision, not just a legal one.
The AI era heightens this concern even further. With enormous capital pouring into foundational models and proprietary data ecosystems, a handful of firms are poised to define the very infrastructure of thought and decision-making. If left unchecked, we will soon be licensing intelligence itself from a cartel of transnational entities, none of which are answerable to Indian consumers, laws, or courts.
India cannot afford to remain a digital colony—dependent on transnational platforms whose incentives lie elsewhere. Sovereign competence in the digital age means the ability to govern both citizens and corporations, local and foreign. The tools of governance must evolve to meet the power of platforms.
To regulate Big Tech is not to shun innovation. It is to ensure that innovation serves the republic—not the other way around.