Act on Development of an Environment that Provides Safe and Secure Internet Use for Young People, carrier and device filtering duties
Act No. 79 of 2008, Arts. 2, 13-19
A citation is an address, not a summary. The first part names the law; what follows narrows it to the exact section, article or paragraph.
In force.
An age-appropriate design code rule binding private bodies.
As of 7 September 2026.
What this law does
Drafted with AI from the cited sources under the direction of UnGovr staff. UnGovr holds editorial responsibility for this page.
A person is a young person (seishonen) under this Act if under 18. Before concluding a mobile phone or PHS internet-connection service contract, the carrier must confirm whether the counterparty is a young person and, if not, whether the actual device user is (Art. 13).
The carrier must then provide the internet connection conditional on use of a youth-harmful-information filtering service whenever the contracting party or device user is a young person, unless the young person's guardian opts out (Art. 15), and a seller of a covered mobile handset must implement filtering-enabled measures on the same conditional basis (Art. 16).
A general (fixed-line) internet connection provider must supply filtering software or a filtering service on request from any user (Art. 17). A manufacturer of an internet-connectable device must build in or otherwise ease the use of filtering software before selling the device (Art. 18), and a developer of software that directly controls such a device's operation must make a best-efforts attempt to the same end (Art. 19). The Act carries no penalty, fine, or administrative-order provision for a violation of any of these duties.
If you get it wrong
Criminal exposureNo
Private right of actionNo
Who enforces it
Enforcement body
no enforcement body or administrative order power is created by this Act
What it reaches
Age threshold
18
Covered services
mobile phone and PHS internet connection services; general fixed-line internet connection services; internet-connectable device manufacture and sale; software directly controlling an internet-connectable device's operation
Read the law
official Japanese statute text, e-Gov Japan's national law database
no official English translation is published for this Act