A Mumbai court has rejected Reliance Jio's plea to pull the Airtel's 'Fastest Internet' speed advertisement off air.
In March, Reliance Jio had won the first battle against Airtel in the same ad controversy. The former had registered a complaint with Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI), urging it to take action against the Airtel for using the phrase: "officially India's fastest network" in its ad. It has to be noted that Airtel had cited third party internet speed tester Ookla LLC.
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Based on the user reviews in the third and fourth quarter of 2016, Ookla had awarded the fastest mobile network service provider certificate to Airtel in February. Airtel used this to promote its network speed capabilities, but Reliance Jio wasn't impressed with Ookla's methodology used to determine the internet speed and moreover, it is not officially recognized by either of the government agencies: Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) or the Department of Telecommunications (DoT).
This gave Reliance Jio the leverage to counter Airtel's ad and was successful in making the former take off the word "officially" in its advertisements.
Later, Airtel changed its content in the ad and aired the refurbished version in June. Even the new ad irked Reliance Jio and it registered a protest with the Mumbai court on account of conspiracy, defamation and breach of trust. But, it has suffered a setback in the second round.
The Mumbai magistrate court said that the every private company has the right to market its products using independent agencies and try to gain upper hand over the competition. Similarly, Airtel has done it, but there is no evidence to suggest that the ad caused loss to the applicant, in this case, Reliance Jio. The company's counsel also failed to come up with proof to prove loss to the public at large and the court dismissed the petition.
"It is nothing but a marketing policy. Thus, during this voyage of technology era, if any service provider has chosen to adopt test methodology of its services by an independent agency wherein the said independent agency has authenticated by its certificate, then there could not have been any dissatisfaction or wrongful losses to other competitors including complainant," Live Mint reported metropolitan magistrate KG Paldewar as saying in the judgement order.
Airtel has welcomed the court's decision, but Reliance Jio is yet to respond and it remains to be seen if the former would take the matter to higher court or not.
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