In recent years, a lot of foreign investors and international companies from different parts of the globe have shown interest in expanding their business to the Japanese market. This resulted in a very stiff business competition in the Land of the Rising Sun particularly in the online world.
Among the biggest digital company names that prevail when it comes to online business are Google LLC, Apple Inc, Facebook Inc and Amazon.com Inc which are regarded as GAFA, for brevity. In order to promote fair online business competition as well as protection of personal data in the internet, officials of the Japanese government released a statement that they intend to enact new laws that would strictly implement regulations on these big American based online companies.
By the year 2020, the official announced that an upcoming bill will be forwarded to the Japanese Diet or National Legislature which will be mandating the GAFA to specifically divulge their internal procedures on how they set the results displayed when netizens search for various topics online. In addition, these online information technology firms will be obliged to disclose the methods that they implement in regularly managing their online websites.
According to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, “While the new law will ask (digital platformers) to improve transparency of their transactions by disclosing information such as reasons for declining to do business (with certain companies), the new rules will respect the autonomy of the operators as much as possible so as to avoid hindering innovation.”
The reason behind the intended law to be imposed by the Japanese government is that there were reports that major online companies such as Google and Amazon feature search results that gives preferential advantage to some products and services over the others, thus affecting neutrality and fairness in the search results.
Reference: Japan to introduce bill to ensure fair online business competition
