Introduction

Two years after the Competition Commission of India (“CCI”) notified the Commitment Regulations in March 2024, the regulator has yet to approve a single commitment proposal. At the same time, a parliamentary panel is publicly scrutinising the regulations, and the CCI itself has just released a consultation paper proposing significant procedural amendments including stretching the application window from 45 to 60 days and nearly doubling the outer timeline for completing commitment proceedings from 130 to 180 days. Add to that the Google Play Store case sitting in the CCI's inbox, the first commitment application to make it to the public consultation stage, and you have a mechanism that is simultaneously under legislative review, regulatory self-correction, and real-world stress-testing all at the same time.

This blog examines the CCIs commitment mechanism against the backdrop of the two developments putting the mechanism under the spotlight: the Rajya Sabha’s Subordinate legislation Committee scrutinising the regulations, and the CCIs own proposal to amend them. Drawing on a cross-jurisdictional comparison with the European Union (“EU”) and United Kingdom (“UK”) frameworks, the blogs seeks to ask whether these changes actually fix the right problems, or whether the deeper structural constraints remain untouched, while utilising the Google LLC ( Case No. 42 of 2022) commitment application as a lens to understand what is at stake when the CCI finally passes its first commitment order.

What Exactly Is Being Proposed and Why?

The commitment mechanism under Section 48B of the Competition Act, 2002 (“the Act”) was introduced by the 2023 Amendment to allow parties facing inquiry for abuse of dominance or anti-competitive vertical agreements (under Section 4 and 3 of the Act) respectively to offer binding remedies voluntarily before the Director General (“DG”) files its investigation report. The aim was quicker market corrections and avoiding lengthy, costly litigation. India's commitment framework offer specific structural feature: the window for filing a commitment application opens when the CCI passes a prima facie order and closes 45 days later hard stop. Once the DG report is filed, the mechanism is unavailable. This creates a peculiarly narrow corridor for parties to act.

The CCI's background note accompanying the draft amendments acknowledges that administrative and procedural issues have emerged in practice prescribed timelines, defect rectification, fee adjustments, and the consequences of invalid applications. The proposed changes would:

• Extend the filing window from 45 to 60 days from the prima facie order

• Extend the overall proceedings cap from 130 to 180 working days (and match the extension period to the same)

• Allow 15 working days (up from 7) before the application comes up for consideration at an ordinary meeting

Therefore, the changes introduced are incremental and process-oriented. The CCI is not proposing to overhaul the framework's basic architecture.

The Global Picture: What India's Framework Is and Isn't Replicating

The European Commission (“EC”) operates under Article 9 of Regulation 1/2003, and over 26 months typically elapse before a commitment decision is finalised. The established timeline reflects a careful “preliminary assessment” process, market testing, third-party consultation, and the expectation that commitments be “unambiguous” and “self-executing.” Critically, the EC can accept commitment applications at any stage of proceedings and there is no hard outer timeline analogous to the DG report cut-off.

The EU has proactively accepted Article 9 commitments in over half of all enforcement decisions between 2005 and 2019. It also explicitly excludes cartels, reserving the mechanism for abuse of dominance and non-cartel agreements which mirrors India's scope exactly. The EU does not specify a hard deadline for when parties must offer commitments, though it sets a minimum two-week period for parties to decide whether to participate in settlement discussions once the Commission has indicated suitability.

The United Kingdom’s (“UK”) Competition and Markets Authority (“CMA”) is similarly flexible on timing, accepting commitments “at any stage of an investigation until a final decision is reached.” The UK also has a tiered discount architecture for its settlement mechanism (up to 20% pre-Statement of Objections, up to 10% post), suggesting that it prices in procedural efficiency differently depending on how early parties engage. For commitments, no admission of liability is required, parties simply offer detailed remedial measures. Additionally, the UK similarly doesn't confine parties to a post-prima-facie window and has described commitment decisions as tools that “encourage proactive compliance” and tend to generate fewer appeals than adversarial proceedings.

For India's commitment framework, the more instructive comparison is the EU model. India's 60-day window, even as extended, remains among the most constrained globally. The question of whether this serves the statutory purpose early market correction is worth putting on the table. If a company needs time to model remedies, consult internally, retain economic experts, and coordinate across jurisdictions (particularly relevant for global platforms), 60 days remains tight. What the proposed changes are doing is aligning with the EU's general philosophy of procedural flexibility but without touching the structural constraint that limits the mechanism's applicability in the first place.

The Subordination Committee's Scrutiny: A Useful Friction

The Rajya Sabha Committee on Subordinate Legislation reviewing the commitment and settlement regulations is a legitimate institutional check. Subordinate legislation in India frequently escapes the level of parliamentary scrutiny that primary statutes receive; a committee actually drilling into whether the regulations are consistent with the parent act's objectives is not routine.

Based on its mandate and the scope of what it is reviewing, the Committee is likely to probe some fundamental questions: whether the 45-day window (now proposed 60) is genuinely workable for parties to formulate meaningful remedies; whether the bar on appeals against commitment orders is constitutionally and procedurally appropriate given that no findings of wrongdoing is made. The Committee may also scrutinise whether adequate safeguards exist for third parties and consumers whose interest are directly affected by a commitment order but also have no formal standing in the proceedings.

The CCI's decision to come forward with amendments at precisely this moment responding to what it calls “experience gained from implementation” reads partly as a proactive concession that the framework needed refinement, and partly as an effort to demonstrate responsiveness to parliamentary oversight.

Google and the First Real Test

The Google Play Store probe involving alleged unfair practices related to the listing of real money gaming applications is currently the most consequential live test of the commitment framework. Public consultation on Google's commitment proposal has been completed. The CCI now needs to decide.

What makes this significant beyond its facts is context: the CCI's first-ever settlement order also involved Google (the Android smart TV case), where a ₹20.24 crore settlement amount was accepted with a 15% discount after Google agreed to structural modifications in its OEM agreements. The CCI has shown it can operationalise these mechanisms for Big Tech. The commitment order, if and when it comes, will set the template for what “adequate” and “self-executing” commitments look like in the Indian context the standards the EU has refined over 20 years of Article 9 practice and the UK has embedded through cases like the Google Privacy Sandbox commitments.

If the CCI approves the Google Play commitment, the resulting order will be legally binding and non-appealable as is the case under Section 48B of the Act. That finality, which India shares with the EU model, is deliberately designed to prevent settling parties from litigating the outcome. It is also why the adequacy of the commitment review process matters so much before that order is passed.

The Deeper Design Question

There is a tension at the heart of India's commitment framework that the proposed amendments do not resolve: the mechanism is simultaneously supposed to be a quick, market-correcting tool and a rigorous regulatory process complete with DG involvement, public consultation, multi-stage CCI consideration, and no appeal. Speed and thoroughness pull in different directions.

The EU has addressed this by accepting that commitment proceedings take about 26 months not a sprint, but also not infinite litigation. The UK accepts that “appropriate” cases for commitments are those where concerns are "readily identifiable" and remedies are capable of "quick" implementation. India has attempted to compress this into a 130-working-day (now proposed 180-working-day) window, with a filing cut-off that is earlier than any comparable jurisdiction.

The 45-to-60-day extension and the revised proceedings timeline are sensible housekeeping. But the more fundamental questions are whether the pre-DG-report cut-off should be reconsidered, and whether the commitment review should be more formally structured with a preliminary assessment equivalent to the EU's framework.

India's commitment mechanism is young, under-tested, and now being revised in real time. That is not a criticism it is the normal trajectory for novel regulatory tools. The more important thing is that the revision is driven by honest engagement with what isn't working, rather than by optics. The CCI's willingness to consult publicly and acknowledge procedural shortcomings is a good sign. Whether the next versions of the regulations will produce the first commitment order and whether it will hold is the question that the Google case will answer before any amendment does.

Gunjan Sharma is a fifth year law student at Rajiv Gandhi National University of Law, Punjab.