India’s biggest B2B marketplace takes OpenAI to court

Say you want a chunk of plywood. Or a passenger lift. Or a power cable. Or a corrugated packaging box. Chances are you will find yourself on IndiaMART, the country’s largest B2B marketplace connecting buyers with suppliers. With 60% of market share and a 12,000 crore market cap, the company essentially commands this space. There is one major problem though: ChatGPT. In December, IndiaMART filed a petition against OpenAI in the Calcutta High Court for “selective discrimination” at the hands of the company, saying that its LLM “specifically and consciously” excludes it from its results while servicing other e-commerce platforms. In a hearing, the court said the exclusion seems to have occurred “without any logic”. The case is ongoing. As our host Praveen Gopal Krishnan says, the “specifics of the case are far less interesting” than the proverbial can it seems to have kicked down the road. The case asks some crucial second, third, and fourth order questions about AI, competition, and who gets to win in this new market. To answer all of those questions and give us a picture of the regulatory landscape of India, we have Samir R Gandhi on this episode. Samir heads Axiom5, a boutique law firm specialising in competition law. He has spent over two decades at various law firms, and has had a ringside view of the development of competition law in India from the time of its enactment.He says the case gives him a sense of “deja vu” because it is fundamentally about an old incumbent being challenged by a disrupter. But the questions posed by AI systems — “part morality, part philosophical, part business model, part geopolitics” — will have wide-ranging implications for the market from a legal standpoint. Tune in! This episode was produced by Vidhatri Rao and edited by Cymasonic Productions.____Zeus, the mascot of Zero Shot, was generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken. Write to us at [email protected]. We are all ears!____Recommended Reading: Ghosted by the bot: Why IndiaMART is desperate to be visible on ChatGPTCCI Rejects Allegations of Anti-Competitive Conduct against Uber and OlaAccioAmazon V. Perplexity: Welcome To The Battle For The Future Of Commerce