As the four-year anniversary of the 2022 enactment of Europe’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) approaches, the European Commission is assessing the act’s performance and evaluating whether adjustments are needed. That’s big news, not just in Europe but around the world, as other countries have closely watched the results of the EU’s strategy for regulating tech platforms.
The most relevant and comparable regulatory effort is Japan’s Mobile Software Competition Act (MSCA), which passed the Japanese Diet in 2024 and went into full effect in December 2025. Japanese policymakers thus had the opportunity to learn from Europe’s experiences and fine-tune their own bill.
As a result, Japan’s approach to platform regulation may offer some useful insights to European policymakers. It doesn’t hurt that Japan has a technologically advanced, high-income economy at roughly the same level as Europe. Moreover, like Europe, Japan is facing challenges with slow productivity growth that platform regulation is in part intended to address. Over the last decade, Japan’s productivity grew at a meager 0.8% annually, just slightly ahead of the EU’s 0.7% productivity growth rate.
With the EU’s DMA review coming this spring, this paper compares the Japanese platform regulatory approach with its European counterpart. It begins with an exploration of recent productivity growth in the EU’s information and communication sector. Then, it evaluates four key areas for platform regulation — user choice and security, protections for children, interoperability, and innovation — in which the Japanese approach differs from the DMA.
