The Competition Commission of India (CCI) has dismissed an antitrust case against Facebook-owned WhatsApp. The order was made public on Tuesday (August 18). Earlier in May, Reuters had reported that the CCI was investigating WhatsApp for potential antitrust violations.
The plaintiff had claimed that WhatsApp attempted to abuse its dominance as a messaging platform to foray into UPI payments. However, the CCI is not convinced enough to take any legal action against WhatsApp.
“As stated by WhatsApp, the number of users being served under the beta version is limited to less than 1% of its users in India. To that extent, the Commission tends to agree with WhatsApp that this allegation is premature,” reads the order.
The latest development comes at a time when WhatsApp is facing troubles to scale up its WhatsApp Pay operations. While the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) approved the service in February since the messaging giant reportedly agreed to comply with the data localization regulations, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) informed the Supreme Court it has not permitted WhatsApp Pay to go live for full-scale operations earlier this month.
WhatsApp’s ambitious WhatsApp Pay expansion has been facing issues since early 2018. Every time the service got closer to launch, the company faced new problems that stopped the service from getting widely launched.
In fact, India is not the only country where WhatsApp Pay is facing hurdles for expanding its operations. WhatsApp had to suspend WhatsApp Pay in Brazil merely a week after it got launched in the country.
