Bengaluru, Sept. 13 -- Online messaging platform WhatsApp told the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) on Friday that the Competition Commission of India (CCI) had no evidentiary basis to conclude it had abused its dominant market position. The company argued that the regulator had neither conducted a user survey nor recorded user testimony, and had failed to obtain Daily Active User (DAU) data from rivals such as Signal and Telegram. In the absence of such evidence, WhatsApp said, the CCI could not substitute its own assumptions for user expectations. Senior counsel Arun Kathpalia, who appeared for WhatsApp, further pointed out that its 2016 privacy policy, introduced two years after the platform was acquired by Meta, had already been upheld by the NCLAT. That policy gave users the option to opt out of data sharing, and those who exercised that choice continue to retain it. He argued that CCI erred in finding fault with WhatsApp's 2021 update for not offering a similar opt-out, stressing that no major platform in the industry, from "Google and YouTube" to "TikTok and Skype," provides such an option. Kathpalia made the submissions before a bench of NCLAT chairperson Ashok Bhushan and technical member Arun Baroka, while challenging the a Rs.213.14 crore penalty imposed by the competition regulator over the messaging platform's privacy policy changes. Responding to CCI's findings that the 2021 update created a sense of "compulsion, coercion and urgency," WhatsApp maintained that the changes only gave it greater flexibility in collecting and processing data and did not diminish user choice. It emphasised that the regulator's conclusions were speculative, especially since not a single user had complained or been examined to establish such concerns....