On June 3, 2026, Apple ended a year of resistance and agreed to hand the Competition Commission of India (CCI) the financial records it needs to set a penalty in the long-running App Store case, securing a "final extension" to file by June 25 (MacRumors). The detail that matters is not the deadline but the denominator: Apple will disclose India-specific revenue, not global turnover. That single choice may be the difference between a fine measured against roughly $350 million of affected local App Store revenue and one measured against Apple's worldwide income — an exposure analysts put as high as $38 billion under India's 2024 penalty regime (Agrud Partners).
The case is real, and so is the harm
Let us not minimise the underlying finding. The CCI's investigation arm, in a 142-page July 2024 report, concluded that Apple abused its dominant position in the market for app distribution on iOS, holding that the App Store is an "unavoidable trading partner" for developers who must use Apple's proprietary in-app billing and pay commissions of up to 30% (Digitimes). The complaints date to 2021 and were brought by developers and bodies including the Alliance of Digital India Foundation and Match Group. On the merits of the conduct, the regulators have a serious case: a mandatory payment rail and a take-it-or-leave-it commission are exactly the kind of tying behaviour competition law exists to police.
Steelmanning the global-turnover rule
India's shift to a global-turnover base was a deliberate, defensible policy choice, not a drafting accident. The Competition (Amendment) Act, 2023 — passed by Parliament and tracked through the legislative process (PRS Legislative Research) — added an explanation to Section 27(b) defining "turnover" as global, and the CCI's Determination of Monetary Penalty Guidelines were notified on March 6, 2024 (IndiaCorpLaw). The regulator's logic is genuinely strong: digital platforms benefit from network effects, and a firm that books minimal local revenue can otherwise treat a relevant-turnover fine as a rounding error. If a $38 billion company is fined on $350 million of Indian sales, the deterrent signal to a trillion-dollar multinational is close to zero. Tying penalties to global scale, the argument goes, is the only way to make enforcement bite against firms whose power is global even where their reported local footprint is thin.
Why the narrowing is nonetheless the right result
That case is real — but it is also the strongest argument for a ceiling, not a base. The proportionality problem is acute. The same analysis that flagged the $38 billion figure notes it would exceed the prior statutory maximum by more than a hundredfold, against conduct confined to one product line in one country (Agrud Partners). India already litigated this question. In Excel Crop Care Ltd. v. CCI (8 May 2017), the Supreme Court held that penalties under Section 27(b) must be computed on "relevant turnover" — revenue from the product connected to the contravention — not total turnover, precisely to keep punishment tethered to harm (Supreme Court of India). The 2023 amendment was written to override that holding.
The better designs are not hypothetical. As one detailed critique argues, the EU and UK both express their maxima as a percentage of worldwide turnover used as an outer cap, while calculating the actual fine from affected sales — preserving deterrence without severing the rational nexus between conduct and consequence (SCC OnLine). Apple's pending constitutional challenge (W.P.(C) 17934/2025) presses exactly this point under Articles 14 and 21: that a penalty untethered from the affected market is arbitrary and disproportionate. One need not accept Apple's framing to see that a fine 100 times the size of the conduct it punishes is a poor advertisement for evidence-based regulation.
What proportionate enforcement looks like here
The goal of this case should be structural, not spectacular. Indian developers gain nothing from a headline-grabbing fine that lands mostly in litigation and appeal; they gain when the in-app payment monopoly is opened, when alternative billing and developer communication are permitted, and when the 30% take rate faces real competitive pressure — the remedies that actually change behaviour. India's market gives it leverage to insist on those outcomes; Apple's local share has climbed to roughly 9% and the country is now a strategic growth and manufacturing base, which is exactly why a remedy-first posture would stick.
The June 3 concession quietly reintroduces proportionality into a framework that had drifted from it. By accepting India-specific financials, the CCI keeps the penalty anchored to the market actually harmed — the Excel Crop Care principle in practice, even if not yet in law. That is the version of antitrust a pro-innovation, open-internet jurisdiction should want: tough on the conduct, exacting on the remedy, and disciplined about the fine. Deterrence that survives appeal beats deterrence that merely makes a press release.