By SUSUMU IMAIZUMI/ Staff Writer
November 17, 2022 at 16:50 JST
The headquarters of the Japan Fair Trade Commission in Tokyo’s Chiyoda Ward. The FTC is currently investigating if Visa Worldwide Japan Co. infringed on the Anti-Monopoly Law. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)
Japan’s Fair Trade Commission will launch a fact-finding survey of major digital news distribution platforms, including Google and Yahoo, suspecting they have thrown their weight around to get contracts that are unfavorable to news outlets.
The trade watchdog is expected to make a set of proposals for improving the situation for media companies in its report. But they are not legally binding.
According to its Nov. 16 announcement, the survey will cover Google and Yahoo, search giants that media organizations provide their content to either for free or at some charge. It will also cover other large players in the digital news ecosystem, including social media company LINE and aggregators SmartNews and Gunosy.
The commission plans to send questionnaires to about 300 companies, including newspapers, magazine publishers and TV networks. It will also interview officials at the digital platforms in question.
The FTC is considering saying in its planned report that digital platforms are violating the Anti-Monopoly Law by abusing their dominant bargaining positions.
“We can make more substantial proposals if we find their practices breach the law,” an official of the commission said.
In February last year, the FTC found that the standards for calculating the distribution charges of online ads were ambiguous, along with the way advertorials were being run, and called for more clarity.
The commission decided to conduct a fresh study focusing on platforms’ news distribution services after it concluded those platforms showed few signs of improvement in their responses.
The FTC’s investigation follows efforts by other countries to prod digital platforms into paying fairer prices for the content they distribute.
The EU updated its copyright regulations in recent years to better protect media companies and their content.
Last year, Australia enacted a law to oblige digital platforms to pay news companies for linking to their content in search results and news feeds. A similar bill was submitted to the U.S. Congress last year.
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