Abstract
Discussion of dark patterns in India has largely asked whether any single statute, competition, consumer protection, or data protection law, is doctrinally equipped to capture manipulative interface design. This article argues that a prior, structural question now matters more: once at least three regulators, the Competition Commission of India (prospectively empowered under the Draft Digital Competition Bill, 2024), the Central Consumer Protection Authority under its 2023 Guidelines for Prevention and Regulation of Dark Patterns, and the Data Protection Board of India under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, each possess an independent and overlapping legal basis to act against the same interface, no mechanism exists to determine which regulator decides first, on what evidentiary basis, or with what effect on the others. Drawing on the Competition Commission’s own experience in the Google Android and Play Store proceedings, where the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal struck down several design-mandating remedies as exceeding the legal basis available under an ex-post finding of abuse of dominance, and on the Consumer Protection Authority’s 2023 Guidelines, which expressly acknowledge but do not resolve their overlap with other laws, this article shows that fragmentation is not a speculative risk but an observable feature of India’s current enforcement landscape. It compares two international responses, the United Kingdom’s fused single-regulator model under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, 2024 and the European Union’s managed-separation model under the Digital Markets Act, and finds that even the EU’s explicit statutory relationship clause has not prevented national authorities from reaching Digital Markets Act-scoped conduct through the backdoor of consumer protection law. The article proposes a notification, primary-characterisation, and shared-evidentiary-registry framework for India, designed to prevent this specific failure mode without requiring the wholesale institutional consolidation that a fully fused model would demand.