The Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC), the country’s antitrust watchdog, is expected to find Google guilty of violating its Anti-Monopoly Act. According to Nikkei, the body said that it determined that the search engine’s contracts with smartphone makers had given it an unfair edge against its rivals, thus harming the search market.
The JFTC reportedly began investigating Google for a possible breach of the act back in October, a few months after a US judge ruled in a similar fashion that the Alphabet-owned company had engaged in an unfair monopoly within the US.
It should come as no surprise that this is not the first time Google has been hit with antitrust lawsuits. Back in 2019, it was fined €1.49 billion (~RM6.97 billion) in the EU for breaking the bloc’s antitrust laws. In 2020, it was slapped with two antitrust lawsuits within a span of 24 hours in the US, again for breaching anti-competitive laws, as well as hindering and undermining the competition.
In October of this year, it was ordered to open the Play Store to Tim Sweeney’s Epic Games. That ruling included a permanent injunction, requiring it to allow third-party app stores into its app library for the next three years.
At the time of writing, Google had yet to respond to any queries regarding the current antitrust allegations by the JFTC.
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