BREAKING THE PARALLAX: BIG TECH IN INDIA

Abstract

"This paper examines the role of Big Tech in India through the conceptual lens of parallax, understood as the analytical distortion that arises when platform power is assessed from shifting institutional, legal, and geopolitical vantage points. Existing scholarship and policy debates tend to frame Big Tech in India either through Global North regulatory paradigms emphasizing monopoly power, market foreclosure, and the need for ex-ante constraints or through a domestic developmental narrative that positions digital platforms as engines of innovation, inclusion, and infrastructural expansion. This paper argues that neither perspective, taken in isolation, adequately captures the legal and political economy of platform governance in India. The paper situates India as a strategic site in the global platform economy, characterized by scale, data intensity, and regulatory experimentation, while also marked by structural dependencies on foreign digital infrastructure. It analyses how India’s fragmented regulatory architecture, spanning competition law, intermediary regulation, data governance, and sector-specific controls, produces overlapping and sometimes contradictory legal classifications of Big Tech firms. These shifting classifications generate a parallax effect within law itself, enabling both regulatory discretion and strategic compliance by platforms. Focusing on competition law and state-platform relations, the paper shows how formal commitments to market contestability coexist with practical constraints arising from infrastructural reliance and governance trade-offs. Antitrust enforcement, while normatively significant, remains limited in its capacity to address entrenched platform power without disrupting essential digital services. At the same time, the Indian state’s relationship with Big Tech is neither one of capture nor outright resistance, but of negotiated interdependence combining regulation, partnership, and control.