Invisible Foreclosure and the Failure of Antitrust Perception: How Corporate Governance Masks Anti-Competitive Exclusivity in Indian Digital Platforms

In the Indian digital economy, which is rising, Amazon, Flipkart, Book My Show, and Google are using advanced exclusivity systems, such as preferred seller structures, exclusive product releases, manipulations of algorithmic rankings, and extended contractual lock-ins, to centralize the market. These practices are seemingly rational business approaches, which create insidious exclusionary consequences beyond the purview of liability under Section 3(4) and 4 of the Competition Act, 2002. It is theorized in this article that the sickness of Indian antitrust enforcement is essentially perceptual: a structural blindness to invisible foreclosure, in which corporate governance apparatuses transform visibly anti-competitive behavior into doctrinally pure enterprise. The analysis breaks down landmark regulatory moments of the CCI investigations of Amazon and Flipkart (20202024), Google Android investigations (20222025), the casebook Book My Show (2026) and the abrupt withdrawal of the Draft Digital Competition Bill (August 2025) through the prism of an interdisciplinary duct. It introduces constructive analytic foreclosures, visible harm: it introduces to the view of its traditional antitrust intuitions the role of the boardroom deliberations, executive compensation regimes, entrenchment of promoters, and opaque algorithmic ecologies to establish commonplace acceptance of exclusion.