Weeks pass, but the tech powerhouses’ legal troubles remain the same. It’s now Japan’s time to go up against Google and Apple. The two American powerhouses have been the subject of a fresh antitrust probe by Japanese authorities.
For Apple and Google, there’s one more. While the two tech giants are involved in legal battles, Japanese authorities keep an eye on them. According to the Nikkei news agency, Japan’s competition regulator has opened a fresh antitrust inquiry into whether Apple and Alphabet, Google’s parent firm, have engaged in anticompetitive activity in the smartphone operating system market.
The goal will next be to examine the structure of the BONE market, which the group believes has remained too rigid, and assess if the two firms have broken Japanese monopoly legislation by abusing their positions. The regulator, for example, holds Google responsible for forcing its search engine on the country’s smartphone makers. To do so, the regulator will undertake interviews and surveys with other operating system operators, application developers, and smartphone users in collaboration with the country’s regulatory authorities.
As a result, Japan has joined the lengthy number of countries that have filed legal action against the two titans. For example, numerous US states have sued Google for abusing its dominating position, while the European Union has slapped billions of euros in fines on the company for identical reasons.