A study panel under Japan’s Consumer Affairs Agency has released a draft interim report calling for comprehensive regulation of “dark patterns” — tactics like disguising subscription sign-ups as “trials” and obstructing cancellations. On the forum, posters called for mandatory cancel buttons and browser-only cancellation, pointed to Amazon and California’s regulations as examples, while others voiced skepticism about how slow the response has been.
Japan’s Consumer Affairs Agency to regulate “dark patterns,” making cancellation obstruction illegal — panel releases draft interim report
On August 24, Japan’s Consumer Affairs Agency presented a draft interim report to its “Study Group on Digital Transactions and the Act on Specified Commercial Transactions.”
The draft states that comprehensive rules should be established against displays and UI (user interfaces) that distort consumer decision-making — so-called “dark patterns” — such as advertising something as a “trial” while actually steering users into a subscription.
Source: japan.cnet.com / Original article here
California has a similar law — cancelling has to be at least as easy as signing up.
That's great lol
They absolutely need to include this.
Otherwise, companies pull sneaky moves like a certain company we know — easy to sign up, but the moment things get tough for them, suddenly cancellation is email or phone only.
Not sure how it is now, but a few years back Mitsubishi UFJ Bank and some brokerages were like that.
This kind of regulation should've happened over a decade ago, back when mobile phones were becoming basic infrastructure — makes you wonder why only now.
Cracking down on pressure against independent entertainers was decades late too. Really shows you the caliber of our politicians and bureaucrats.
The Consumer Affairs Agency should seriously pay compensation out of their own pockets for a decade's worth of victims.
Too slow! Move fast, now!
Otherwise those scammers will already have their next workaround ready.
>> In designing the regulation, the proposal notes that because problematic tactics are diverse and change quickly, making it impossible to list them all in advance, a 'reasonably comprehensive set of rules' with flexibility should be considered. At the same time, to avoid discouraging legitimate displays and UI design, it also calls for clear criteria — such as laying out illegal patterns as a 'blacklist' in subordinate regulations or guidelines. As for violations, the basic approach would be correction through administrative measures.
>> The proposal also addresses the contract stage. Even after a 2021 revision to the Act on Specified Commercial Transactions required a final confirmation screen, consumer complaints about subscriptions have stayed at high levels. In response, the proposal calls for mandatory display of the total payment amount on the final confirmation screen, and a ban on splitting transaction terms across separate displays. For 'upselling' — presenting seemingly better terms after an order is finalized to push users toward pricier plans — it would require clearly marking what changed, so users can compare before and after.
>> The panel also flagged that further study is needed on new sales methods combining AI, such as transactions handled through AI agents and AI-powered targeted advertising or dark patterns.
>> In Japan too, tactics that use labels like "trial" to create the impression of a one-time purchase, while actually locking users into a subscription, are on the rise, especially in online transactions. Dark patterns can be deployed online at low cost and tend to affect far more consumers than similar offline tactics. The proposal warns this could lead to large-scale harm. At the same time, current law isn't clear enough to adequately cover today's online transactions, and aggressive displays that intimidate or confuse consumers aren't even covered by regulation.
Like how Rakuten has the 'receive store emails' box checked by default, or how signing up for Yahoo's flea market app comes with terms sharing your info with PayPay, or how everything seems to have terms trying to share your data with LINE.
Basically, a form of punitive damages system.
Toyoko Inn too.
Thought it looked cheap, looked into it, and it was a student discount rate (lol)
The lines are already full, but instead of a busy signal you just get connected and left on hold forever — and you're the one paying for the call the whole time. That's beyond unacceptable.
I mean, if it's not direct profit for the company itself, it'd be a lot harder for them to drag their feet on cancellations, right?
I think the Apple Store works kind of like that —
the subscription is tied to your store account rather than to you individually, so you can cancel just by going through the store.
they can count on some percentage being people who won't cancel, or can't figure out how,
plus a few percent more who just keep paying forever,
even after they've literally died.
People who never use the service but keep paying forever —
that's probably where the profit comes from.
auto-cancellation by default should be mandatory.
Background and Key Points
Japan’s Consumer Affairs Agency (消費者庁, Shohisha-cho) is the cabinet-level body that enforces the Act on Specified Commercial Transactions (特定商取引法), the main law governing sales practices, cooling-off rights, and now, increasingly, subscription commerce. This isn’t the agency’s first attempt at the problem: a 2021 revision to the same law already forced companies to show a “final confirmation screen” before a purchase. The draft report presented on August 24 concedes that reform didn’t work — complaints about subscription traps have stayed high regardless — which is why the new proposal pushes for a broader, evolving “comprehensive” framework plus an illustrative blacklist, rather than another narrow, single-purpose rule. The reference to the OECD’s 2022 dark-patterns definition situates this as Japan catching up to an international regulatory conversation, not inventing the concept.
The thread’s actual disagreement is less about whether regulation is needed — nobody defends the practice — and more about pace and mechanism: several posters want concrete, enforceable specifics (a mandatory cancel button, browser-based cancellation matching California’s “as easy to cancel as to sign up” standard) rather than the vaguer “comprehensive rules plus guidelines” approach the report describes, while others focus purely on how many years too late this is, invoking DAZN’s much-criticized cancellation flow and elderly victims as the cost of delay.
What the thread doesn’t note is that this is still an interim report from a study panel, not legislation — there’s no bill, timeline, or penalty structure yet, and “correction through administrative measures” is far softer than the punitive damages posters are demanding.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Science News+) thread “[Society] Japan’s Consumer Affairs Agency to regulate ‘dark patterns,’ making cancellation obstruction illegal — panel releases draft interim report.”