The government on Tuesday officially announced the outline of a new bill aimed at regulating big technology companies.
The bill does not include provisions prohibiting unfair acts, such as tech giants taking advantage of their powerful positions to inflict detrimental treatment on business partners. The government instead will urge big tech companies to voluntarily enhance efforts to disclose their business information, seeking to achieve both innovation and regulation with the bill.
The content of the new bill was finalized during a Tuesday meeting of the Conference for Digital Market Competition chaired by Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga.
The government plans to submit the new bill on improving the transparency and fairness of transactions of digital platform operators to the ordinary Diet session as early as February, aiming to put it into effect by the end of fiscal 2020.
Under the new bill, big tech companies will be required to submit annual reports to the Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry, while working on measures to disclose information to their business partners and making transactions more transparent. If they fail to make sufficient efforts, the ministry will issue them a correction order or an improvement order. The Fair Trade Commission will also investigate malicious cases under the Antimonopoly Law.
The government was initially considering raising specific examples of illicit acts by IT giants and banning such acts under the bill.
At a news conference after the meeting, Yasutoshi Nishimura, the minister in charge economic revitalization, explained the latest decision, saying, "We decided not to include clauses prohibiting unfair acts in the bill because we are concerned that such ban may hamper innovation."
For the time being, the envisaged law will apply to the smartphone app markets operated by Google LLC and Apple Inc., on which the government already conducted fact-finding surveys, as well as online shopping services operated by such firms as Amazon.com, Inc., Rakuten, Inc. and Yahoo Japan Corp.
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