Killer Acquisitions and Competition Law: Is India Prepared for Big Tech Acquisitions?

A ₹350 million acquisition can pass through India's merger control regime without the Competition Commission of India will ever hear of it, so long as the target's assets and turnover stay below the statutory thresholds. This is clearly how Zomato's acquired Uber Eats' Indian operations in 2020, and this shows a problem far bigger than a single deal. Killer acquisitions, in which a dominant firm buys a small rival to remove a upcoming competitor rather than to improve on its technology they remain largely invisible to a merger control regime that measures competitive significance through assets and turnover. The paper asks whether India's competition law framework is equipped to detect, assess and prevent such acquisitions in digital markets. The study is doctrinal as it analyses the Competition Act, 2002, the 2023 Amendment and the Combinations Regulations, 2024. It also examines the Commission's treatment of Walmart/Flipkart, Facebook/Jio and the WhatsApp privacy policy proceedings, and compares them from the European Union and Germany. It finds that the deal value threshold of Rs. 2,000 crores had made large transactions visible but leaves earlier stage acquisitions untouched, that Indian law contains no concept of nascent competition, and that data has no place in the statutory assessment of a combination. India has begun to see killer acquisitions without yet acquiring the tools to stop them.