India stands at a crossroads. With Big Tech platforms embedded deep within its economic, political, and digital infrastructure, regulating them is no longer just a legal challenge, it’s a test of national will. In the face of American pushback, institutional inertia, and systemic dependency, India’s approach to regulating artificial intelligence and platform monopolies will determine its future: as a digital sovereign or a digital colony.
The Global Reckoning with Big Tech, and Where India Stands?
The unregulated expansion of tech giants like Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, and Apple has reached an inflection point. Once celebrated as engines of innovation, they are now seen as monopolistic infrastructures, wielding unparalleled control over data, markets, and influence. Europe has responded decisively with the Digital Markets Act, while the United States remains conflicted, balancing commercial interest with growing domestic concern.
India, the world’s largest open digital market, remains deeply entangled with these platforms, functionally reliant on Google for navigation and transactions, on WhatsApp for communication, and on Meta’s platforms for political discourse. This entrenchment makes regulation a high-stakes affair, fraught with potential economic and diplomatic fallout.
Unlike the EU, India cannot regulate in isolation. It must contend with geopolitical realities where any action against Big Tech may be interpreted as hostility toward the U.S. itself.
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A Domestic Framework Struggling to Keep Pace
India’s regulatory ecosystem, designed for the analogue economy, is still catching up with the layered complexity of today’s platform empires. Regulators lack the technological literacy and structural independence to effectively oversee digital monopolies that operate across software, data, payments, advertising, and now artificial intelligence.
The judiciary, too, is ill-equipped. Courts are burdened by legacy interpretations and slow timelines, making them unfit to adjudicate issues like algorithmic bias, opaque moderation systems, or anticompetitive API restrictions with the urgency required. Without a skilled techno-legal force within enforcement agencies, the government risks being overwhelmed by the legal sophistication and lobbying prowess of trillion-dollar firms.
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Between Innovation and Inertia: Will Is the True Regulator
Ultimately, India’s ability to regulate Big Tech is not a question of capacity alone, it is a question of courage. These firms are not just service providers, they are global geopolitical actors, backed by their home states. Any regulation will provoke pushback, not just from the companies themselves, but from Washington’s diplomatic machinery.
India’s path forward demands a strategic reset. It must reframe regulation not as anti-investment, but as pro-sovereignty and pro-competition. That means updating laws to reflect the realities of platform capitalism, creating agile enforcement tools, and preparing for the diplomatic consequences of pushback. Equally important is insulating public policy from regulatory capture. Today, former bureaucrats advise the very firms they once oversaw, and legal advisors move seamlessly between government panels and corporate boards. This silent co-optation, masked as “ease of doing business,” corrodes the state’s ability to enforce accountability.
About the author – Prakriti Jha is a student at National Forensic Sciences University, Gandhinagar, currently pursuing B.Sc. LL.B (Hons.) with a keen interest in the intersection of law and data science. She is passionate about exploring how legal frameworks adapt to the evolving challenges of technology and justice.