Streaming and ePublishing companies join fight against Google’s billing policy

Several companies including Matrimony.com, Shaadi.com, Unacademy, Kuku FM and TrulyMadly had earlier approached the high court, challenging Google’s notice asking them to either adopt the company’s mandated billing route or risk being removed from its Play Store.

“It is clear that companies are hurting due to Google’s predatory moves and hence attempting to seek relief from the honourable courts,” Shaadi.com founder Anupam Mittal told ET. “Google already takes out a big part of a digital company’s revenue through its ad solutions and now it wishes to take out another big chunk using the app store, rendering most of them unviable.”

Even after the Competition Commission of India’s order that Google should not discriminate and impose any conditional billing charges, the company is “finding loopholes and exploiting developers” while they await further orders from the antirust body, he alleged. The cases in the Madras High Court seek very specific reliefs against Google versus the CCI proceedings that are broader in nature, he said.

The petitioners in the high court claim that Google’s payment policy violated local law and that imposing an 11-26% commission on their revenue would cause irreparable loss to the app developers.

Queries sent to Google remained unanswered at press time Tuesday.

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Google also has filed an application saying that the complaint must be rejected, a person in the know said. “The hearings have concluded on that application and the parties have been given time to file their written submissions and the judgment in that application is reserved. As of now there are 14 petitioners who have filed complaints against Google and the court has ordered that these companies cannot be delisted from the Play Store,” he told ET.While Google has given the web-billing option to app developers, some people said this would not work well for regional OTT players.

“Google has said that we can do web billing, which is what a player like Netflix does. Netflix isn’t a part of these discussions as customers of the platform are more tech savvy and sophisticated in terms of payment methods. Whereas for regional players, which cater to primarily an Indian audience who may not be as comfortable with web billing, this is not a viable option,” another person told ET.

A Google spokesperson had earlier told ET that in order to sustain the value provided by Google Play, it expected app developers to “fairly participate” in its business model, as they do with other app stores.

“We are closely working with developers to help them comply with our policies and if a developer chooses not to comply, they continue to have many other options to operate their business on Android,” the spokesperson had said.