Hello and welcome to another Emlex podcast. I'm Laurel Henning, senior correspondent at Emlax, and speaking to you from our offices in Sydney.

Joining me for today's podcast and dialing in from Tokyo is senior

correspondent Toko Sekiguchi. Hi, Toko. Hi, Laura. Over the last year, regulatory pressure on

digital platforms, so companies such as Facebook and Google, has been increasing around the world

as regulators try to hold companies to account on issues from data privacy to fake news.

Across the Asia Pacific region, a focus on competition is coming to the fall in policy discussions.

For example, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is currently finalising its digital platforms inquiry,

a final report is expected on the 3rd of June, and recommendations from the report, which has looked at the impact of digital platforms on competition in the media and advertising services markets, it won't be binding, but those recommendations will consider whether there should be tax breaks for media organisations for certain types of journalism, such as investigative reporting. and it will also look at how digital platforms

manage user data. But further north in Asia, the pressure on these companies is coming from a slightly

different angle, and part of that is due to a strong domestic industry. But that's really enough for

me. Toko, you're a much better place to tell us all about this. So tell us about the regulatory environment

for digital platforms in Japan.

What's our starting point here?

Well, like the rest of the world scrambling to deal with GAFA's dominance, Japan has recently

accelerated its effort to set up rules to ensure competition in the IT sector.

And just jumping in there, can you explain what GAFA is?

Yeah, GAFA is Google, Apple,

Facebook, and Amazon. You get the first letter of these company names. And these companies are famously now at the top of the rank in the world's largest public traded companies in terms of market cap.

Initially, Japan's competition regulator, the Japan Fair Trade Commission, compiled a data

economy survey that garnered attention worldwide in 2017.

They had led the discussion on the digital data economy and the new challenges it brought to

competition policy. But in recent months, Japan's prime minister, Shenzhou Abid's administration

...