PREDATORY PRICING AND REGULATION ON ONLINE BETTING GAMES IN INDIA

Predatory Pricing and Regulation on Online Betting Games in India is a timely and multi-disciplinary edited volume that interrogates one of the most pressing fault lines in India's rapidly evolving digital economy — the intersection of anti-competitive pricing practices and the contested regulatory landscape governing online betting and gaming. Bringing together fifteen thematically interconnected chapters authored by legal scholars, economists, and policy researchers, the volume examines how India's existing legal architecture is straining to contain a sector that, by 2025, engages over 570 million players and generates revenues projected to reach USD 9.1 billion by 2029.
The opening chapters establish the conceptual and historical foundation. The volume situates predatory pricing — defined under Section 4(2)(a)(ii) of the Competition Act, 2002 as the deliberate below-cost pricing by a dominant entity to eliminate market rivals — within the distinctive dynamics of India's digital gaming ecosystem. It traces the trajectory of the sector from its Vedic-era cultural antecedents through the colonial Public Gambling Act of 1867, the post-independence mixed economy, and the liberalisation reforms of the 1990s, to the landmark enactment of the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Bill, 2025 — which prohibited all real-money gaming platforms nationwide and triggered a seismic restructuring of an industry in which real-money gaming accounted for approximately 86% of sector revenues.
Central to the volume's analytical contribution is the critique of India's regulatory fragmentation. The Competition Act, 2002 — designed in a pre-digital era — is shown to inadequately address the multi-sided nature of online platforms, the opacity of algorithmic pricing, real-time behavioural manipulation, and cross-subsidisation strategies through which dominant platforms sustain below-cost operations to acquire and entrench market share. The Competition Commission of India's 2025 amendment to its predatory pricing methodology — broadening cost benchmarks to incorporate depreciation and sunk costs — is examined as a significant but incomplete step toward effective digital market regulation. The imposition of a 28% GST on real-money gaming from October 2023 is analysed for its dual effect of tightening the margin buffers that enabled predatory pricing while exacerbating asymmetric compliance burdens between well-capitalised offshore operators and domestic start-ups.
The volume's comparative chapters extend the inquiry globally. The European Union's Digital Markets Act, 2022, the United Kingdom's Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Act, 2024, and the regulatory frameworks of the United States, China, Singapore, and Australia are examined as reference points for ex ante obligations, algorithmic auditing authority, and expedited enforcement mechanisms — tools conspicuously absent from India's current framework. Market concentration data is sobering: by 2025, the top five online betting platforms command approximately 78% of market share, a pattern attributed not merely to organic growth but to systematic predatory conduct by financially superior incumbents.
Subsequent chapters address the volume's cross-cutting dimensions. The constitutional validity of state-level online betting bans is interrogated against the skill-versus-chance distinction and the federal division of gambling regulation under the Seventh Schedule. The intersection of predatory pricing with intellectual property rights is examined, as is the role of the Competition Commission in relation to consumer protection law. A dedicated chapter adopts a sports law perspective, tracing the legal treatment of fantasy sports and e-sports within India's regulatory architecture. Another chapter analyses the role of media trials in shaping and accelerating the 2025 betting ban, raising questions about the relationship between public narrative and legislative action.
The volume's final chapters converge on diagnosis and prescription. Regulatory lacunae identified include the absence of sector-specific guidelines for online gaming, the lack of real-time market monitoring authority, insufficient inter-agency coordination between central and state regulators, and the vulnerability of the domestic market to offshore platforms that exploit jurisdictional gaps. A proposed three-tier regulatory architecture — combining ex ante obligations for dominant platforms, enhanced merger control for digital markets, and specialised enforcement procedures including algorithmic auditing and emergency competition powers — forms the volume's principal policy recommendation.
Predatory Pricing and Regulation on Online Betting Games in India makes a significant scholarly contribution by mapping, with doctrinal rigour and empirical grounding, the collision between a fast-moving digital market and a regulatory order still calibrated to an analogue age. It is an indispensable reference for competition law practitioners, gaming regulators, policy researchers, and legislators engaged in charting the future of India's digital economy.