In the midst, when across the globe concerns, about the handling of personal data and monopoly practices, are growing, Japanese government is also heading to set up a new watchdog in the country to keep check and balance on big data companies like Google and Facebook.
The proposed body will observe the competitive practices, ensures personal data protection, promote fair competition by making anti-trust recommendations, according to a presentation made at a government advisory panel on Wednesday.
The new regulator will also prepare strategies for evaluation of acquisitions and mergers to prevent them to from a monopoly on personal data of consumers or data related to their massaging.
It will be the summer of this year, when Japanese government is expecting to be finalizing formation of its new regulator, but with an uncertainty of about when will be new formed regulator become fully functional.
Big tech giants are now been facing a trend of tighter anti-trust regulations for them globally and the Japan’s current move is also a part of it, while critics says about these anti-trust rules that with a slightest loophole in these rules could let these major companies to create dominance over social media, search engines and e-commerce platforms.
Officials, through their presentation at the meeting on Wednesday, have demonstrated the cabinet ministers about the dominance created by companies like Google, Amazon.com, Facebook, China’s top search engine Baidu Inc and China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd, which lead them to increase their influence into retail shops, drones, payment systems, autonomous cars and interconnected devices.
The growth of digital economy, with itself brought some qualities like fro companies, it made it possible to generate profits at lower costs and easier to approach new customers, but some big technology companies could also abuse these merits by influencing with high fees, unfair contracts with suppliers, sudden changes to term of usage and arbitrary search results, said the officials in the presentation.
