Japan to Submit New Law For Opening Up Mobile App Stores in Attempts to Demonopolize App Distribution

The government of Japan will be submitting a new law to open up mobile app stores to the country’s parliament in 2024, in an attempt to demonopolize app distribution as well as in-app payments.

In a report by the Nikkei news outlet, the government in Japan is working to submit a new bill to the parliament by the end of 2024 for opening up mobile app marketplaces in the country.

This follows the news of Japan looking to charge platform owners consumption tax for mobile game purchases with big IT companies such as Apple and Google abusing their monopoly position in the Japanese market.

The new bill is said to encourage competition with other companies in the areas of smartphone app distribution and payment systems.

The New Bill

The main areas to be regulated in the new bill are app stores and payments, search, browsers, and operating systems

The details of the bill, including how the surcharge will be calculated, will be worked out in the spring of 2012.

The Japanese government will designate the target companies based on a combination of indicators such as sales and number of users with the majority of the target companies being giant corporations such as Apple and Google.

Through the new law, the Japanese government plans to encourage both Google and Apple to accept stores and payment systems operated by other companies, provided that they protect security and privacy.

According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications’ White Paper on Information and Communications, Japan’s mobile app market is expected to be worth $29.2 billion in 2011, a 50% increase from 2006.

Search Results

As for search, it is forbidden to give preferential treatment to services provided by the company in search results.

For example, it may be forbidden to make sure that Google’s services always appear at the top of search results when searching for airplane and restaurant reservation sites on Google.

Regulation of giant platforms is also progressing overseas with the European Union (EU) plans to fully apply the Digital Markets Act (DMA) to Apple and other companies in the spring of 2012.

The DMA prohibits companies from offering preferential treatment for their services and imposes fines of up to 10% of the company’s global sales for the previous year.

In the U.S., Google announced on April 18 that it had agreed to pay $700 million in settlement to consumers, states, and other parties in an antitrust lawsuit over its app store.

Companies in the digital field tend to be unstoppable once they start to grow in size and Japan’s new law is intended to establish proactive regulations in line with the DMA.

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