Introduction: Digital India

Digital India is the core concept of Government of India and any regulator across India, as the Indian operation system is been transiting from a physical copy to an online process of submission, monitoring, review and further follow-ups including even a payment system.

Unlike earlier being on a long queue and get the task done from any regulator is now somehow to extend substantially reduced due to technological involvement, and innovators available in country who are day and night pushing themselves to drill down process of any activity in order to increase the user experience.

The experience of getting various form to incorporate the company and payment of fees, filing income tax return and appeal thereon, GST return, Movies and Shows, School and College Fees, Food and Beverages etc. are very handy and easy due to various tech provider to Government/Regulator as well as end users to eliminate the queue system to click mode.

Impact on Digital Platforms

We all appreciate the effort made by our innovator with tech giant of globe ‘’Google’’ to drill down the customer experience at optimum level and further improvement thereon, bud suddenly the monopoly decision of Google to monetize the its facilitate which is earlier free with discretionary modes, is shocking and widely impacting the tech innovator startups and even unicorn on this platform, sabotage badly 

The decision of Google to monetize the in-app purchase policy resulting 30% cut to Google is killing the tech innovator, and may badly impact the innovation of Country which is in fact need of an hour. Google play store’s new commission structure is just disturbing our tech innovator and most impact fully to those who are in financial innovation field either its digital mutual fund distributor, semi-closed prepaid payment system, payment gateway or aggregator and so on due to 30% cut sharing. Those innovator pocket is going to harm substantially having huge loss already in their financial due to expenses incurred to developed the platform and its regular maintenance at the standard level is deeply heartening their revenue.

Earlier irrespective of nature of app, the app developer can upload their app on the Google Play Store provided the guidelines set by Google is met. Now, with the new commission structure, mandate them to share 30% cut as commission to Google for those app which is subscription base. Now without discussing the matter with the Industry expert and its genuine player, the decision been imposed or been planned to enroll from 1st September 2021.

Even our Government and Industry player are not making a genuine effort to eliminate or reduce or relax the terms to the extent possible to leverage the regulation so that our budding tech innovator entrepreneur can get the breathe of relief. It is great backlog to our ambitious project of Digital India, which need to be heard at priority from the Government and Regulator Level. And it is need of an hour.

Further decoding the in-app purchase policy, app with subscription feature like gaming, news, OTT platform, music, dating, fitness, data storage etc. are supposed share their 30% revenue to Google Pocket as commission.

Though it does not cover those apps which enable transaction of physical goods like e-commerce, food delivery, ticket buying services, transport services, online payment (Paytm, PhonePe) etc. for time being, the future is not clear on it also. As nobody know what next us going to be from tech giant Google, the way they come up with this 30% payment cut as commission.

However the payment gateway like Razorpay, PayU are going to suffer substantially from this decision. Besides that the entire subscription model games and OTT platform will suffered majorly as the revenue cut is very high. This decision on serious note definitely demoralize our tech player who are committed to providing facilitate digitally on click-to-go and further it may leads to high cost for end users to avail such services from this platform. Therefore the stakeholders should come up with alternative platform to list the app or to negotiate with Google, but being on dominant of Google, it is very hard to negotiate therefore the industry association or regulator or Government itself can negotiate the decision of tech giant Google to revisit the pay cut so that the Government ambition of Digital India can succeed at large with better user experience.

Conclusion

Conclusively the payment cut system from Google is soft challenge to all the stakeholders to create the new platform with more quality, stability and popularity. However for the time being, it is disturbing entire digital payments system as well as Indian start-up ecosystem collectively.