A Letter, Not a Ruling
On August 21, 2026, the Coalition for App Fairness (CAF) — the developer advocacy group backing Spotify, Epic Games, and others in fights against Apple and Google — sent Japan's Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) a letter arguing the two companies are not complying with the Act on Promotion of Competition for Specified Smartphone Software, commonly called the Mobile Software Competition Act (MSCA). The letter's target is the second round of compliance reports Apple, its Japanese subsidiary iTunes K.K., and Google filed with the JFTC, which the commission published on July 27, 2026 covering the period from the law's December 18, 2025 full-enforcement date through the end of Japan's fiscal year on March 31, 2026. CAF argues the reports show unchanged fee structures and "unwillingness to give up their ability to extract rents rather than compete," and it is asking the JFTC to move to formal enforcement.
What The Law Actually Does
The MSCA designates Apple and Google as "Specified Software Operators" over their mobile operating systems, app stores, browsers, and — for Google — search. It bars self-preferencing, blocks obstruction of alternative app stores and payment systems, and requires data-portability and interoperability commitments. Crucially, the JFTC's own English guidance on the law describes surcharge orders of 20% of relevant turnover for violations — double the 10% ceiling under Japan's ordinary Antimonopoly Act, and among the steepest platform-conduct penalties in any jurisdiction. That is a serious enforcement backstop, not a symbolic one.
Steelmanning CAF's Case
CAF's frustration is not baseless. Independent reporting on the July reports found that app-developer groups and legal analysts saw "little meaningful improvement" in Apple's and Google's fee structures despite nominal support for alternative app stores and lower Google Play service fees. A regulator that designed a 20%-of-turnover surcharge specifically to deter foot-dragging should not tolerate compliance theater — reports that check every procedural box while leaving the underlying rents (a cut on every transaction routed through a gatekeeper's rails) essentially untouched. If Apple and Google are treating disclosure obligations as the whole of their duty rather than a floor, CAF is right to say so loudly, and the JFTC's own July 27 release invites exactly this kind of scrutiny: it opened both an information-submission form for comments on the reports and a separate form for reporting suspected violations.
Why Formal Enforcement, Right Now, Would Be Premature
But there is a difference between flagging weak compliance and demanding the JFTC skip straight to cease-and-desist orders and surcharge proceedings. The MSCA's own architecture — compliance reports, public comment windows, a violation-reporting channel, and JFTC-published assessments distinct from the operators' self-reporting — was built for iterative, evidence-based escalation, not instant enforcement on a single reporting cycle eight months into the law's life. The JFTC explicitly reserves the right to weigh submitted evidence before acting and, as it stated in its own release, individual responses to submissions carry no guarantee of specific enforcement action. That is not evasion; it is due process for two of the most consequential platform-regulation targets in Asia. A rush to surcharge orders based on one compliance cycle — before the JFTC has independently verified fee and interoperability claims against real developer experience — risks the same trap the EU's Digital Markets Act fell into: enforcement actions that move faster than the evidentiary record, inviting years of litigation that ultimately produces less certainty for developers than a patient, well-documented case would.
The Proportionate Path
Japan's law already gives the JFTC the tools CAF wants used — it does not need to be goaded into using them prematurely. The better sequence is for the commission to treat the July reports as a baseline, use its new comment and violation-reporting channels to build a comparative record across the next reporting cycle, and reserve the 20% surcharge for demonstrated, not merely alleged, non-compliance. Genuine gatekeeper rent-seeking deserves the harshest tool in the JFTC's kit. But a regulator that fires that tool on the first sign of developer frustration — rather than on a documented pattern — undermines the predictability that makes proportionate regulation credible to everyone, including the app developers CAF represents. The JFTC built a law with escalating consequences for a reason; it should let that ladder do its job before reaching for the top rung.
What to Watch
The JFTC has not indicated a timeline for responding to CAF's letter. The next formal signal will likely be whichever violation reports the commission's new online form generates, and whether the JFTC references them in any future guidance update — the same guidelines-review process that has already expanded once since the law's passage.