Indian startups go to court to stop Google's new in-app billing system

A group of Indian startups has asked a court to suspend Alphabet Inc. Google's new in-app billing fee system until the country's antitrust body investigates the U.S. firm for alleged non-compliance with its directives, a legal filing showed. The Alliance of Digital India Foundation last month asked India's antitrust regulator to investigate Google for devising a new system startups say still charges them a high service fee, despite an antitrust directive in October to allow use of third-party billing services for in-app payments. In October, the Competition Commission of India fined Google $112 million and said the company must stop forcing developers to use its proprietary in-app payment system, labelling it an abuse of Google's dominant market position. But Indian startups argue Google's UCB system still imposes a "service fee" of 11-26%, compared with the earlier in-app payment system that charged a fee of 15-30%.