Regulation of platform companies has taken a different turn since 2022, when the Law on Improving Transparency and Fairness of Certain Digital Platforms went into effect. On August 2, 2024, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry recommended Amazon Japan, Apple, and iTunes to improve their business practices with companies using their platforms. And on April 15, 2025, the Japan Fair Trade Commission issued an exclusion order against Google’s “search” service. This is the first time the Japanese government has issued an exclusion order to a global platform company.
In this context, this study explains the Japanese characteristics of digital platform regulation and analyzes the background and content of the recent policy shift.
Japanese digital platform regulation emphasizes practical measures by digital platform operators. Regulatory approaches such as the Act to Promote Transparency in Digital Platform Transactions are a typical example of reactive regulation to address issues arising from digital platform transactions rather than proactive regulation based on fair trade principles such as user convenience, fairness, and transparency. However, the Smartphone Software Competition Promotion Act, which was enacted in June 2024, adopts an entirely proactive approach.
As the internet and social networking services are rapidly growing in Japan as a space for pursuing economic benefits, voluntary and autonomous regulation of platform operators has not been satisfactory in practice. As a result, there has been a shift toward “co-regulation” and “preregulation” methods that utilize the advantages of voluntary regulation of platform operators while ensuring the effectiveness of legal regulation.
Moreover, the application of existing antitrust laws has the limitation of being reactive, applied after unfair trade has occurred. In particular, as the number of users of digital platforms has increased rapidly, various problems have begun to emerge and structuralize, and the shift to regulatory methods is an active response to the reality.