Japan's Fair Trade Commission says the country will join US and Europe in challenging market abuses by Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan will join forces with the United States and Europe to take on any market abuses by the four Big Tech companies …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Fair Trade Commission's 2020 pledge was a statement of intent rather than an action — and the later record shows Japan followed through. A year on, the agency opened an inquiry into whether Apple and Google use their smartphone OS dominance to squeeze out competition, then in 2023 turned to Google's search business over allegations it pressured OEMs to prioritize its own results.
That search case escalated into a cease-and-desist order that Google publicly vowed to fight, and by 2025 the commission had moved to a formal order targeting Google's leverage over local smartphone manufacturers. The 2020 announcement matters because it framed Japan as the third leg of a US-Europe-Asia enforcement front, part of a broader wave of platform rules across Japan, South Korea, and Australia.
First-order effects
- Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon now face potential scrutiny from three major regulatory blocs simultaneously, raising the cost of any single market-abuse dispute becoming a multi-jurisdiction fight.
- Japanese smartphone manufacturers gain a domestic regulator actively examining whether their OS and search terms with Google are fair, shifting negotiating leverage toward the OEMs.
Second-order effects
- Google's decision to contest the cease-and-desist rather than settle signals other targeted practices — app store terms, ad placement, default-search deals — will draw similarly adversarial responses instead of quiet compliance.
- Neighboring regulators in South Korea and Australia, already drafting stronger platform rules per the Financial Times' survey, can point to Japan's enforcement record when justifying their own measures.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Big Tech antitrust enforcement becomes structurally multilateral: conduct challenged in Washington or Brussels gets picked up in Tokyo, leaving no single market where a contested practice can operate unexamined.
- The durable target is platform gatekeeper leverage itself — defaults, preinstalls, and self-preferencing — with regulators converging on those mechanisms regardless of which company or product triggers each case.
The trend: Platform gatekeeper regulation is consolidating into a coordinated multi-region enforcement regime, with Japan's FTC moving from 2020 pledge to binding orders against Google within five years.