India needs a digital competition framework that addresses market power and promotes fair competition without undermining innovation, investment and economic growth, experts said at The Dialogue’s 4th Annual International Conference in New Delhi on Thursday.
The conference, titled “Competition, Innovation, and Growth: Building India’s Digital Economy,” focused on how India can regulate its rapidly evolving digital markets while preserving the benefits of technological innovation. Discussions centred on enabling micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) to expand through digital platforms, strengthening India’s artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem and developing competition policies suited to changing global trade, investment and economic security dynamics.
The speakers emphasised that the challenge for policymakers is to address genuine competition concerns without imposing rules that could restrict market entry, increase compliance costs or discourage businesses from investing and innovating.
Dr Lazar Radic, Assistant Professor of Law at IE Law School and Senior Scholar (Competition Policy) at ICLE, said Europe’s approach to digital markets had increasingly shifted from a focus on efficiency and consumer welfare towards prioritising market structure.
Radic cautioned against prescriptive, ex-ante regulation, which establishes obligations before specific competition concerns are assessed through individual cases. He argued that such regulation assumes policymakers can anticipate how technology and markets will evolve, despite the possibility that new products and business models could rapidly change competitive boundaries. He said a flexible, case-by-case competition framework was better suited to protecting consumers while allowing innovation.
Shanker A. Singham, President and Chairman of the Board of Competere Group, said policymakers faced a fundamental choice between allowing businesses to compete on their merits and prescribing market structures in advance. He argued that restrictive regulation could increase compliance costs for smaller companies, limit opportunities for businesses to scale and constrain economic growth.
Elisa Ramundo, Founder and Director of SCOPE Global Exchange, also called for a measured approach to digital competition regulation, particularly in developing economies. She said governments needed to recognise the limits of their ability to predict technological change and enforce complex regulatory frameworks. Rather than duplicating existing technologies in pursuit of strategic autonomy, she argued, countries should build on available technologies and capabilities to encourage innovation and investment.
India’s existing competition framework
Kazim Rizvi, Founding Director of The Dialogue, said India should prioritise strengthening its existing competition framework rather than introducing a separate ex-ante regulatory regime for digital markets.
He pointed to the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which establishes obligations for designated major digital platforms, and highlighted the importance of regulatory flexibility as markets evolve. He also cited recent amendments to India’s Competition Act, including the Settlements and Commitments Framework, as an opportunity to address competition concerns through more timely and flexible remedies while retaining case-specific economic assessment.
The settlements and commitments framework provides mechanisms for resolving certain competition matters, subject to applicable legal requirements. These mechanisms can offer alternatives to prolonged proceedings in eligible cases.
Rizvi called for stronger enforcement capacity at the Competition Commission of India (CCI), specialised expertise within its Digital Markets Division (DMD) and greater efficiency at the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT).
He said the priority should be to address competition concerns without constraining technological progress, raising barriers for startups or weakening incentives to invest and innovate.
AI competition and market structure
The debate is particularly relevant to India’s AI ecosystem, where policymakers must identify genuine barriers to competition, assess the availability of alternatives and understand how regulation can support businesses seeking to innovate and scale.
The conference drew on The Dialogue’s 2026 study, “Competition, Innovation, and Market Structure in India’s AI Ecosystem: An Empirical Assessment,” which examined competitive dynamics and adoption patterns across India’s AI value chain.
The study found that 85% of AI developers relied on public cloud infrastructure, while 74.5% reported sufficient choice among computing providers. More than 79% viewed open-source models as at least a partial substitute for proprietary alternatives, and 96.2% relied on open-source tools, with 62.2% reporting high reliance.
However, 63.2% identified data standardisation as their biggest data-related challenge, while 47.2% cited talent availability as a major barrier to competitiveness. The study also found that 75.5% of surveyed companies, including startups and developers, operated across at least two layers of the AI stack.
AI adoption had a positive impact on 85% of surveyed businesses, with 61% reporting better decision-making and 55% faster delivery. Additionally, 79% of consumers reported that AI had improved their experience, while 74% agreed that integrating AI into digital services had improved their overall user experience.
The findings provided an empirical basis for the conference’s central debate: how India can develop a competition framework that addresses market power and promotes fair competition while supporting innovation, investment and the wider adoption of AI across the digital economy.
