Facilitation to Collusion: Rethinking Hub-and-Spoke Arrangements under Section 3 of the Competition Act 2002

IHub-and-spoke arrangements present a fundamental challenge for competition law: how can a horizontal cartel be established when competing firms, the spokes never communicate directly? The Competition (Amendment) Act 2023 addressed one side of this problem by inserting a proviso to Section 3(3) that extends liability to intermediaries facilitating such arrangements. Yet it left unresolved the more fundamental question of what establishes the necessary connection, the “rim”, between the spokes themselves. This article identifies this unresolved issue as the rim deficit and argues that it, rather than the treatment of the hub, will determine the effectiveness of Indian enforcement against hub-and-spoke arrangements. Drawing on Indian jurisprudence, including the Competition Commission of India’s July 2026 orders concerning HP India, and comparative developments in the United States, European Union, and United Kingdom, the article develops a Facilitation-Collusion Continuum and proposes a two-stage, five-factor test to distinguish proof of the rim from attribution of liability to the hub. It then applies the framework to algorithmic markets, addresses potential objections, and proposes enforcement guidance to give the 2023 proviso coherent and workable content.