Across India's digital marketplace, the architecture of choice has long been quietly tilted — checkout screens pre-loaded with donations, opt-outs phrased as confessions of recklessness, prices that bloom only at the final moment. On Wednesday, India's Central Consumer Protection Authority named nine platforms, including Zepto, IndiGo, and Physics Wallah, and collected roughly ₹20 lakh in fines for these engineered deceptions, known as dark patterns. The action is less a reckoning than a reckoning's beginning — a signal that the invisible hand shaping consumer decisions online has finally draw