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Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2002 23:05:03 -0800 To: Declan McCullagh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Gohsuke Takama) Subject: FYI: Japan's NPA trying to push reguration on internet auction sites in Japan ----------------------- Japan's National Police Agency is pushing to change decades of decades old auction law to apply to internet auction providers while current national diet is on, but without public input. If this law pushed through the diet, all auction site might have to modify their biz models. Funnily, Japanese aucition site providers are kind of not expressing oppositions. Some rumor said they fear over restriction by police if they oppose and others said Keizaisangyo Sho (Ministry of External Trade and Industry) might be going to oppose to NPA initiated change. If this change of law happened, this could be the world first case of that the police reguration applied on internet biz and this could be extended to any internet ecommerce in Japan while the definition of "auction broker" is vague. And this could drag growth of Web Service around because of the mechanisms of it based on a machine exchaging orders in XML format to other machines. Watch out what will happen next. The news appeared today's Nikkei news paper: http://www.nni.nikkei.co.jp/AC/TNKS/Nni20020207D07JFA01.htm Already reported on NYTimes yesterday writen by John Markoff: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/06/technology/06AUCT.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
