India, July 31 -- It is a peculiar irony of modern capitalism that the bigger a technology company becomes, the more time it spends defending itself before competition authorities across the world. There is nothing unusual about that. Firms blessed with market power have, throughout economic history, shown little restraint in exercising it. At the same time, regulators even in the US recently have shown an increasing willingness to test the limits of that power. From Brussels to Washington and now New Delhi, Big Tech has become a regular respondent in antitrust cases. The surprise is, therefore, not that Apple finds itself before the Competition Commission of India (CCI) but how it has chosen to defend itself. Firms, like seasoned diplomats, speak different languages in different capitals. The legal response is tailored to the jurisdiction. At the heart of a case initiated before CCI in 2024 are allegations that Apple abused its dominant position in the iOS app ecosystem by requiring developers to use its proprietary in-app payment system and by levying commissions that competitors claim is unfair and exclusionary. Not surprisingly, Apple rejects this. Part of its defence rests on its size in India (less than 6% of the smartphone market, thus making it is too small to justify abuse of dominance). It also argues its tightly integrated App Store delivers privacy, security and consumer confidence rather than anti-competitive harm. The exceptional argument by Apple is that the director-general's investigation is little more than a cut-and-paste exercise. Passages closely mirror submissions made by rivals such as Match, PhonePe and Paytm, while even a chart on global app spending appears to have been borrowed from a European Commission decision. The unmistakable implication is that the investigation forsakes independent analysis. The cut-and-paste charge is an ingenious defence. Lawyers are inclined to probeprocedural weaknesses. And in pressing this argument, Apple may have inadvertentlyraised a much larger question than it intended:How do regulators gather information onregulated firms? My years at the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) offer a helpful answer. One of the earliest lessons I learnt was that regulators almost never possess all the information they need. Firms do, but are understandably reluctant to reveal it. Competitors often possess much of the same information and, under the right circumstances, are willing to share it. Much of a regulator's effort is, therefore, devoted to reducing the information asymmetry that inevitably exists between it and the regulated firms. One episode, relevant to the present debate, remains vivid. TRAI was then working on India's interconnection regime - a highly technical issue with enormous commercial consequences. It invited operators to present data, their views on the appropriate commercial arrangements, and the international regulatory models they believed India should learn from. Service providers reluctant to share commercial data spent vast amounts onboarding global consultants on regimes in Britain, Canada,and Europe, among others, to arm the regulator with evidence. Each operator had carefully studied what foreign regulators had doneand made detailed presentations before TRAI on what regime India ought to follow. Thesubmissions had liberally borrowed fromother regimes, yet there were no accusationsof plagiarism. The regulator listened and challenged assumptions and eventually arrived at its own conclusions. That experience taught me something economists have long understood. No regulator, however well-staffed, can independently discover every relevant fact about every market it oversees. The regulator's job is, therefore, not to invent facts, but to verify them. And it is empowered to use any instrument it sees fit to arrive at a just, and equitable decision. The regulator is not in the business of writing an original journal article! It is in the business of ensuring Big Tech doesn't use its might to abuse its dominance. Of course, a regulator that simply copies a complainant's allegations without testing them would plainlybe failing in its duty. But the merefact that evidence first appeared ina submission made by Match, PhonePe or Paytm tells us remarkably little. If the facts are accurate, theirorigin is almost beside the point. Ifthey are inaccurate, Apple should demonstrateprecisely why. Judges rely on precedent in a common law jurisdiction like India. Regulators, too, borrow what appears to work and gradually adapt those ideas to local circumstances. This is institutional learning. India's telecom regulatory framework drew extensively on the experience of the Office of Communications (Ofcom) in the UK, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the US, and other regulators. Over time, Indian regulators developed their own body of law and regulatory practice, much of which is now studied and emulated elsewhere. The process works downstream as wellwithout anyone claiming a violation of the rules of origin! It was not uncommon for neighbouring countries such as Bangladesh and Sri Lanka to rely on Indian legislation, rules, andeven drafting language to modernise theirregulatory systems. They were not copying for want of ideas; they were adopting what they believed to be established international best practice before adapting it to their own legal and economic circumstances. Comparative law recognises the idea of legal transplants, a term coined by the legal scholar Alan Watson to describe the way legal rules and institutions migrate from one jurisdiction to another. Competition authorities routinely examine decisions from other jurisdictions, consult complainants, industry participants, academics and consumers. Indeed, if regulators refused to examine information submitted by competitors, the very purpose of consultation would be defeated. Their responsibility is not to ignore such evidence because of its source, but to test it rigorously and decide whether it withstands scrutiny. The real question, therefore, is whether the CCI independently evaluated that material. Independent judgment, not literary originality, is the essence of regulation. I have no doubt that Apple understands this. Independence of judgement, ultimately, is the standard against which CCI should be assessed, not originality of drafting....