Japan Enforces New Law to Regulate IT Giants

Tokyo, Feb. 1 (Jiji Press)--Japan on Monday enforced a new law to ensure that information technology giants do business with small companies on fair terms.

The law for the transparency and fairness of digital platform services obligates IT giants to disclose terms of contracts with business partners and submit reports regularly to the government.

Subject to the law are online shopping website operators with annual domestic sales of 300 billion yen or more and app store operators with annual domestic sales of 200 billion yen or more.

They are expected to include U.S. powerhouses Google LLC, Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., as well as Japanese companies Rakuten Inc. <4755> and Yahoo Japan Corp., a unit of Z Holdings Corp. <4689>.

Japan plans to make its final decision on the companies to be bound by the law around spring to fully implement the rules under the new law.

[Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]