Japan is the latest country to join the fight against Big Tech companies. The nation's antitrust regulator Fair Trade Commission (FTC) can probe market abuses by Big Tech — a term used to refer to companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple — reported Reuters. Japan will join the ranks of the US, European Union and even India and China that are looking to address the growing economic clout of the Big Tech. Kazuyuki Furuya, head of the FTC, reportedly said that Japan could open a probe into any merger or business tie-ups, provided the size of the deals is big enough. FTC is likely to look into the acquisition of FitBit for possible monopolistic behaviour by Google. Google's acquisition of the wearables company has been pending since November 2019, when it was first announced. The deal ran into trouble in the EU, which launched an in-depth probe, concerned over Google's possible of FitBit data to improve its advertisement services. Furuya said that Japan is closely watching antitrust developments, including in Europe. He also indicated at the formation of a global alliance of sorts: FTC will work closely with its US and European counterparts to respond to anti-competitive moves. Furuya explained that Big Tech have similar practices across the globe, hence necessitating global coordination. Within Japan, FTC will reportedly research the country's mobile phone market to see if it can spur more competition in it. Global distrust of Big Tech United State of America: Big Tech companies have been under intense scrutiny…
Please subscribe to MediaNama. Don't share prints and PDFs.
You May Also Like
News
Google has released a Google Travel Trends Report which states that branded budget hotel search queries grew 179% year over year (YOY) in India, in...
Advert
135 job openings in over 60 companies are listed at our free Digital and Mobile Job Board: If you’re looking for a job, or...
News
By Aroon Deep and Aditya Chunduru You’re reading it here first: Twitter has complied with government requests to censor 52 tweets that mostly criticised...
News
Rajesh Kumar* doesn’t have many enemies in life. But, Uber, for which he drives a cab everyday, is starting to look like one, he...