Essentially, Paytm had launched a contest on its app, coinciding with the IPL, and issued cashback as rewards to its users. According to Google, this fell into the category of gambling, which went against its policies. So it took down Paytm’s mobile app from its app store. 

Google came out with a blog post titled ‘Understanding our Play gambling policies in India’. It’s a fairly short post, just four paragraphs long. In it, it clarifies its position by noting that it has a global policy against gambling, which it applies uniformly on all developers. 

It makes no reference to India’s laws and regulations. 

Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder and CEO of Paytm was livid, though. 

And one could argue that he had good reason to be upset. In an interview, he also pointed out that this was a double-standard because Google Pay did something similar—after making a transaction, users are given virtual scratch cards, which give them cashback.

But there was another point. 

While gambling is illegal in India, giving cashbacks is not.

And this was a problem for Sharma, because it meant that Google was operating on its own, doing as it pleased, irrespective of India’s laws.

Since then, Vijay Shekhar Sharma has been aggressively campaigning against Google’s policies, and the message has nationalistic undertones. Paytm even went ahead to launch a competing app store. Others joined in. All of them approached the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) to raise concerns around Google's Play Store billing policy. Investigations were launched against Google.

That was back then. 

Here’s what happened last week.

Well, well, well. 

Google has policies about what apps are allowed on its app store. Except now, those policies are no longer its own, but imposed on it by the government of India. And not just policies, but the very apps that are allowed to be listed on the store are going to be dictated to it, and Google is expected to remove all other lending apps from its store.

What a turnaround. 

For a while now, the Indian government has been aggressively going after lending apps, particularly because many of these have Chinese connections. In fact, my colleague Arundhati wrote an excellent story about this last year, which I highly recommend reading. And since then, Google, in fits and starts, has taken action against these apps. It even removed some of them from the store, citing policy violations. But finally, it looks like India has decided to micromanage the whole situation. 

However, lending apps is only part of the story. 

The story of gambling apps is a bit more complicated. Until now, Google was operating in a zone that was completely divorced from Indian laws (as Paytm found out). The main difference is that while gambling laws in India differ from state to state, there’s an exception carved out for games of skill, i.e., if the outcome is driven primarily by human skill and not by luck, it’s allowed to operate in India because it does not fall under the definition of gambling. 

This is where fantasy games and rummy have an edge. Over and over again, courts across multiple states have ruled them as games of skill. And that’s why as far as online gaming is concerned, nothing is more popular than rummy.

On the other hand, Google has clear conditions for letting betting companies run their apps on the Play Store. For a long time, its policy was to ban everything. But over the last few years, that appears to be weakening. 

It all began in 2017, when it allowed entities in just four countries to distribute their apps on the Play Store, but with a lot of restrictions. Then it expanded coverage to more countries. And now, finally, India seems to have made it to the list. 

And it has begun this distribution with what the Indian government defines as a game of skill. Rummy. And fantasy games. 

But this has made some people unhappy.

India, you decide if carrom is gambling.

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If you're a corporate on the lookout for the perfect personalized and memorable gift for your employees, clients, or business partners, we may have just the thing you're looking for!

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