BEYOND THE INTERFACE: TACKLING BACKEND MANIPULATION THROUGH COMPETITION LAW

[Vashmath Potluri and Shubhranshu are fourth-year students at NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad]

Introduction

In February 2025, allegations broke out that Lenskart had inserted the trademarks “Titan,” “Titan Eye+,” and “Fastrack” in its website’s Metatags, the backend elements of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which is the standard coding system that structures webpages and allows browsers and search engines to interpret their content. This meant that when the Titan brand is searched, the results also show Lenskart's listings, thereby diverting natural visibility/organic traffic from Titan and Titan Eye+. While Lenskart's legal challenge was framed as a trademark infringement case, it presents a larger albeit underexplored question of competition law that is can backend manipulation of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), which is a system that governs online visibility through technical signals rather than product relevance, constitutes exclusionary conduct?  Today, this question is even more relevant in relation to digital markets where discoverability is not incidental but foundational to consumer engagement. Visibility today is not necessarily dependent on competitive merits such as pricing or product quality but on algorithmic rankings shaped by metadata, tagging practices, and interface architecture. In such markets, firms can secretly intercept consumer attention intended for their competitors, thereby undermining market neutrality and distorting competition without engaging in any sort of collusion or discriminatory pricing.

The Titan v. Lenskart controversy exemplifies this distortion: Metatag manipulation. Unlike conventional trademark disputes, which address consumer confusion and the misappropriation of goodwill, the competitive harm here lies in altering the infrastructural conditions of market access. By hijacking discoverability, Lenskart denied rivals visibility, misallocated consumer attention, and weakened contestability regardless of whether consumers ultimately recognised the source. These harms fall squarely within the scope of competition law, which seeks to preserve fair rivalry and prevent exclusionary strategies that distort access. This article situates metatag manipulation as a competition concern rather than a narrow trademark issue. It first analyses how such practices exploit behavioural asymmetries to produce exclusionary effects that evade ex post scrutiny under the Competition Act, 2002 (Act), and then proposes legislative measures, drawing on the European Union’s regulatory experience.

Misallocation of Consumer Attention through Deceptive Diversion

In digital platform markets, visibility is the primary currency of competitive rivalry. As consumer discovery becomes increasingly mediated by algorithms that rely on metadata and ranking signals, firms do not merely compete on product or service parameters but on their relative discoverability within digital ecosystems. This evolution has incentivised exclusionary conduct targeting algorithmic and infrastructural foundations of competition.

Among such exclusionary practices, metatag manipulation is perhaps the most covert and effective. Metatags are coded text on the backend of the webpages that tell a search engine's algorithms about the thematic content of the webpages. When a market player embeds a competitor’s trademark or brand identifiers as its metatags, it may send false and misleading signals to indexing systems, potentially improving its visibility in search rankings, depending on how the algorithm processes metadata. This conduct results in a misallocation of consumer attention that is not based on the product’s merit but in the distortion and alteration of algorithmic logic.

While Indian competition jurisprudence has not yet addressed such conduct directly, such concern has been recognised by foreign jurisprudence. In Brookfield Communications v. West Coast Entertainment, it was held that using a rival’s trademark in Metatags could constitute initial interest confusion, since diverting attention misappropriated goodwill. This reasoning is highly relevant for competition law in digital markets, where consumer choice is shaped at the point of discovery rather than purchase. A similar concern arose in Titan v. Lenskart, where Lenskart’s use of “Titan,” “Titan Eye+,” and “Fastrack” in its metadata caused its website to appear in search results for Titan products. By diverting traffic without legitimate investment in brand development, product innovation, or consumer trust, Lenskart engaged in unilateral exclusionary conduct that engineered market access through backend deception rather than competitive merit.

Behavioural Exploitation through Metatag Manipulation

From the behavioural economics point of view, the mechanics of online discoverability rely on user’s cognitive heuristics such as "position bias”, wherein users far often click on top-ranked search results, frequently misinterpreting higher visibility as credibility. Global studies indicate that the first organic result on Google receives between 27 and 40 percent of all user clicks, with the top three getting more than half of the total traffic. While these findings highlight the importance of ranking position, caution is warranted in directly applying such figures to the Indian or broader Asian context, where user behaviour and market structures may differ. Eye-tracking data further confirms that most users rarely scroll beyond the initial listings, especially under conditions of information overload. In such a case, search rankings become not merely a function of relevance but a critical vector of market power. Algorithmic visibility, therefore, becomes a scarce economic resource that firms can capture for strategic advantage. 

Metatag manipulation exacerbates this abuse by enabling market player to artificially improve their placement within search results through source code-level deception. By embedding metadata or source code with rivals’ brand names or high-traffic keywords, a site can raise its placement in the search results without improving the underlying quality of its product or service. This conduct transforms asymmetry of infrastructural access into market advantage, amounting to algorithmic rent-seeking rather than competitive innovation. Moreover, these tactics operate upstream in the content discovery chain, distorting the indexing system before consumers even see the search results. This results in serious downstream consequences, that is, consumer choice gets distorted, rivals, particularly new entrants, are denied visibility, and the market's allocative efficiency is undermined. The result is a non-price foreclosure of competition where discoverability is delinked from merit, weakening contestability and entrenching information gatekeepers.

Diagnosing the harm in the competition framework

Despite its exclusionary nature, metatag manipulation remains insufficiently addressed under the current statutory framework of the Act. Section 3 targets anti-competitive agreements, which by definition require concerted action between two or more enterprises, but metatag manipulation is typically unilateral, where a firm embeds deceptive keywords or brand terms into its own source code; it does not satisfy the statutory requirement of an “agreement” under Section 3. As a result, such conduct escapes scrutiny even when it produces clear exclusionary effects.

Similarly, Section 4 on abuse of dominance appears more relevant, particularly clause (c) of sub-section (2), which prohibits “denial of market access.” In Matrimony Limited & Another v. Google LLC & Others, the CCI held that self-preferencing in search results constituted denial of market access, recognising that reduced visibility for competitors, even without delisting, could amount to abuse in digital markets. By analogy, Lenskart’s insertion of “Titan,” “Titan Eye+,” and “Fastrack” in its metatags diverted consumer traffic at the discovery stage, diluting Titan’s visibility and restricting access to the online market. This conduct fits the logic of Section 4(2)(c), as it obstructs Titan’s ability to compete on equal terms in a discovery-driven ecosystem.

The difficulty, however, lies in establishing dominance under Section 19(4). In a fragmented eyewear market, where no single entity commands an overwhelming share or user dependence, Lenskart’s dominance may be contested. This exposes a regulatory gap: harmful unilateral conduct can distort market access without involving collusion or a dominant enterprise. Therefore, the Act’s reliance on agreement and dominance as entry points leaves backend manipulation largely unchecked. In digital markets where visibility itself determines viability, competition law must evolve to treat discoverability as a vector of market power and address manipulation through conduct-specific, ex ante regulatory tools.

Way Forward

Even where legislative frameworks have attempted to regulate manipulative platform design, such as Section 8 of the now-withdrawn DCB, which prohibits manipulative practices involving “interface design” and “behavioural techniques.” Applying the interpretive principle of noscitur a sociis, which instructs that a term draws meaning from its textual context, this language appears confined to consumer-facing conduct that influences user choice through visual or interactive elements—arguably excluding backend manipulations embedded in source code, such as Metatag stuffing, which can distort digital visibility without altering the user interface. This illustrates a broader regulatory challenge: many regimes focus on visible design biases but fail to capture invisible code-level conduct that can equally distort competition.

Across jurisdictions, regulators are moving towards ex-ante obligations that promote transparency in ranking systems. Article 5(1)-(5) of the EU Platform-to-Business Regulation (EU 2019/1150), which requires online platforms and search engines to disclose the main parameters that determine content ranking and their relative importance, while Article 6(5) of the EU Digital Markets Act bars unfair ranking practices by designated gatekeepers. Although these frameworks differ in scope, both recognise that ranking opacity can yield entrenched competitive advantages. Similarly, in India, the CCI must exercise its rule-making powers under Section 64(1) read with Section 64(2)(h) to issue Visibility Integrity Audit Rules. These rules would require enterprises to (i) conduct periodic internal reviews of tagging and ranking practices, (ii) maintain detailed logs of keyword usage, metadata inputs, and manual ranking overrides, and (iii) submit to independent third-party audits verifying that discoverability systems operate on genuine relevance rather than strategic manipulation. This would allow the CCI to use a conduct-based trigger whenever anomalous tagging patterns or suspicious visibility outcomes emerge and act early, even before formal dominance is established, to help preserve competitive access in rapidly evolving digital markets. 

However, audit rules alone cannot serve as a permanent solution. In the longer term, a statutory prohibition on misleading backend practices should be incorporated into any future digital competition law. This prohibition should: (i) expressly target manipulative metadata and keyword associations, (ii) preserve legitimate SEO practices, and (iii) apply on a conduct-basis rather than through restrictive “systemically significant” designations. Such a provision would mirror the infrastructural neutrality principle embedded in EU and UK digital market regimes, ensuring that digital visibility remains an open, merit-based competitive input. 

Taken together, these measures would create a layered enforcement strategy that is immediate detection and deterrence through CCI audit rules, and long-term legal clarity through statutory prohibition. By embedding visibility integrity into both procedural oversight and substantive law, the Indian competition regime can prevent backend manipulation from becoming a structural barrier to entry in its rapidly evolving digital markets.