Welcome back. It's an honour to be in your feed once again. This is, of course,

Mlex's weekly podcast covering the top stories in regulatory affairs with the assistance of our team of driven specialist reporters,

whose insights are today as much as ever a must have for those working in the field.

My name is James Panicki. I'm an Emlex senior editor, and I've got a question for you.

Let me assume that you're listening to this podcast on the Friday and that

you're planning to place an online booking with a restaurant over the weekend. As you allow your

eye to wander over the online reviews offered by your favorite restaurant booking portal,

answer me this. Can you trust the rating? And how have the results been ranked?

In Japan, a court has drawn a proverbial line in the sand on this issue.

It has found that tabelog's interference with its search engine algorithm

was a violation of the country's antitrust law.

But how much do consumers actually care?

Even if, say, a search rank like Tabelag did manipulate to lower a restaurant that pays a lot

of money to it to an access, maybe the end user may actually prefer interference that

lowers ranks of saying ad-paying businesses in order to take away

the bias from the advertisement. And we'll bring you that chat with Emlex's Toko Sekiguchi

on the historic court verdict in Japan in just over 10 minutes from now. First up, though, to the

United States. And remember how in the past we've told you that the

chances of the US developing federal privacy legislation were very slim indeed. And we weren't

alone in thinking that the flurry of activity among state lawmakers to establish data privacy

and protection regimes was driven in part by the lack of federal

leadership. But are the times a changing? Well, possibly there is indeed a comprehensive

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