India's Supreme Court has rejected a request by US company Google to overturn a local antitrust regulator that ruled last fall that the tech giant illegally forced Indian smartphone makers to install the Android operating system on its devices.

In October last year, the Competition Commission of India (CCI) fined Google $162 million for unfair use of its dominant position in the Android device market. During the review, the regulator found that the American company used its own dominant position to promote its search engine and applications such as Chrome and YouTube.

Google's agreements with local smartphone makers meant that the latter should pre-install the company's apps on their devices. In addition to this, Google has entered into agreements with manufacturers that prohibit the installation of forked Android operating systems on devices, as well as revenue sharing agreements.

The Indian regulator ordered Google to change the conditions for promoting the Android OS in the country's market, and all agreements concluded by the IT giant with smartphone manufacturers were declared illegal. According to the source, the Supreme Court decided not to intervene on the merits of the case, retaining the right to decide on Google's appeal of the CCI verdict to the lower court. At the same time, a deadline was set for the consideration of the appeal, the decision on which must be announced no later than March 31. Official representatives of Google have not yet commented on this issue.