We’re hosting a MEMBERS CALL next week on a subject that many of you have written to us about: The regulation of App Stores in India. This call will be held on Wednesday, September 8, 2021 at 2 pm IST, and is for MediaNama Members only. This call will be for about an hour and half.
You may subscribe to MediaNama to participate in this call.
Over a decade ago, the then Nokia CEO Stephen Elop warned his company (and via the famous leaked “burning platform” memo, the world) about the increasing dominance of “mobile ecosystems”, saying:
“The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things.”
Today, two ecosystems dominate the handset landscape: Google and Apple, and there are allegations by app developers that they are facing unfair competition from these dominant platforms, in terms of the fees that the platforms extract from developers, as well as preferential treatment in discovery of apps owned by the platform owner.
These allegations have gained significant momentum over the last year, and now countries around the world are contemplating regulations for this very important market. There are investigations that have begun at the Competition Commission of India. Lest we forget, in 2016, the then Telecom Regulatory Authority of India Chairman, RS Sharma, was among the first to highlight that there needs to be “App Neutrality”.
In this call, we plan to discuss the following aspects:
- Current workings of Apple App Store and Google Play Store, including commission rates, policies related to third-party app stores and payment systems
- What is happening in India, including issues regarding real-money gaming apps, enforcement of commissions and reactions from the startup ecosystem, as well as CCI investigations
- Global developments in App store regulations, including the lawsuit in Japan, EU investigation, Epic Games court case, the South Korean law, and proposed legislation in the US and EU
- What can India do?
- Q&A
MediaNama Members will receive an invitation to RSVP via email. In case you haven’t received it, please check your spam folder. If you still haven’t received it, please let us know at hello@medianama.com.
In case you’re not a MediaNama Member, do consider subscribing here to support our work. We’d also love to get feedback on what other subjects we can do a call on, so if you have any ideas, please do leave us a comment.
