- By: Ranjitha Jain Dhanakeerthi
- Virtualaw
- Dec 31
- Comments (0)
WHAT EXACTLY HAPPENED IN CCI-JIO AND AIRTEL, VODA, IDEA CASE?
Ae…. Jio dhan dhana dha………!!!! Every one of us got familiar to this melodious tag line. What a marvellous entry by market tycoon Reliance through its Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited into telecom sector!
And all the well settled Giants like Airtel, Vodafone and Idea got stunned by this entry. Progressively Reliance’s Jio started capturing the market by increasing its subscriber base and started giving very tough competition for them.
Because of this extremely tough competition in the telecom market, issue related to interconnection points raised and Reliance Jio approached the CCI (Competition Commission of India) alleging cartelisation and abuse of dominance by Bharti Airtel Ltd., and Idea Cellular Ltd. and Vodafone India (before the merger of Idea and Vodafone), in violation of Sections 3 and 4 of the Competition Act, 2002 by acting in concert to create hurdles for its entry into the sector by denying its requests for requisite number of Point of Interconnection (POI) or a gateway between two networks for completing calls.
So what this POI is or does?
POI allows the customers of one service provider (say Jio) to communicate with the customers of another service provider (say Airtel).
Let’s understand the concept of POI with the help of the following example:
You must have seen entry gates of Cricket stadium, usually gates (POI or a gateway) are 10-15 and hundreds of people looking for entry (calls from JOI). If the management of Cricket stadium make 30-40 gates , more people will enter but may be at some point of time capacity of stadium will be overcrowded ( as because of Jio’s free call and internet offer number of People are now more than capacity of Stadium)
Imagine a scenario when public can watch the cricket match at the Stadium at no cost, the crowd would come in large numbers (Because Free Ticket is offered).
Coming back to the case again!
The CCI, then in its April 2017 order, found a prima facie case against the companies and asked its director general to conduct an investigation. The three operators approached the Bombay High Court, which in September 2017 granted them relief. The Bombay High Court quashed CCI’s probe against these operators over the alleged denial of interconnection points to Jio and further opined that:
“The Competition Act and the TRAI Act are independent statutes. The statutory authorities under these Acts are to discharge their power and jurisdiction in the light of the object, for which they are established. There is no conflict of the jurisdiction to be exercised by them.”
This prompted the antitrust watchdog and the country’s youngest telecom carrier to move towards the apex court against the decision in January.
A Supreme Court bench, headed by Justice A K Sikri, which heard the appeals said “we are upholding the order of the Bombay High Court on the aspect that the CCI could exercise jurisdiction only after proceedings under the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) had concluded/attained finality, i.e. only after TRAI returns its findings on the jurisdictional aspects”.
But the top court didn’t completely bar the antitrust regulator, calling its intervention premature. The CCI can come in only after the sector regulator TRAI, finds anti-competitive behaviour.
Conclusion:
The Supreme Court, tried to balance the roles of the two regulators i.e CCI and TRAI. As the specific and important role assigned to the CCI cannot be completely washed away and the association between the sectoral regulator (TRAI) and the market regulator (the CCI) is to be maintained.