Antitrust Law Personal Statement

As the official of Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) governing Antitrust law, my goal is to create the first bill in Japan regulating Across Platform Parity Agreements (APPAs) to secure legal foreseeability of market players in Japan to guarantee competitiveness of enterprises.
My public law study at Waseda law school noted me that the issues of chilling effect might interfere with business activities of enterprises, which should be performed freely based on the principle of private autonomy. As Antitrust law allows multiple interpretations of the requirements, I wondered whether the chilling effect could be really excluded in the real world. These experiences let me choose my career at JFTC to get to know mechanism of protecting business

As the youngest project member, I investigated the Amazon Japan G. K. suspected to restrict business activities of the sellers in Amazon Marketplace including APPAs in the seller contracts. My biggest challenge was to research the reports and decisions by foreign competition authorities such as German Amazon case, German Booking.com case, and EU Amazon's e-book case dealing with APPAs. These tasks were vital for the investigation as it lacked in direct precedents in Japan. By gaining knowledge of EU competition laws such as Treaty on the Functioning of European Union by my own, I studied the influences that APPAs restricted business activities of the counterparts and evaluated these facts to determine whether APPAs had effects to limit or restrict competition in relevant markets. Finally, I made reports the critical points of the verdicts for other

I studied online Hotel Reservation Service (HRS) case in Germany in which the APPAs were certified as violations of EU and German competition laws. This experience convinced me that the concept of Narrow APPAs is effective in use to protect internet platform operators and to avoid reducing their investments for internet platform operators to attract buyers. My analysis revealed that most of the foreign competition authorities allow internet platform operators to implement "Narrow APPAs," a regulation form that takes competition promotion effects into account such as eliminating free-rider problems. Thus, I concluded that Narrow-APPAs could properly secure competition promotion effect compared to prohibiting all types of APPAs. Also, I added that Narrow APPAs have to be allowed for business entities in Japan. My supervisors highly evaluated my report. However, I also noted that primarily regulations of APPAs have been conducted by case laws, not by clarified laws. This situation may arise out of the fact that APPAs own both positive and negative competition effects for platform operators, result in tough forecasting whether or not their implementing APPAs are judged to be illegal by competition authorities. In Japan, JFTC has not stated a clear position regarding APPAs yet. Until