During my time in Congress, I was often asked by various international counterparts in my conversations and travels if America really is what it says it is.
“Is your market really open?” “Do your rules really apply to everybody?” “Will my company get a fair shake from American customers, American regulators, American courts?”
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My job as a representative of the U.S. government, and of the people of New York’s 11th Congressional District, was to demonstrate why the answer was yes, and to mean it.
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By contrast, I almost never got asked whether American companies behaved fairly when they showed up in foreign markets. The assumption was that they did, because the American brand carried that assumption with it.
That assumption is one of the most valuable things this country owns. It is also something we maintain by paying attention to it.
This is particularly true for our key ally, Japan, a market on which American digital businesses have become focused. Uber, to take the most prominent example, announced last year a five-year, $2 billion commitment to expand across the Japanese market, with more than $400 million spent in 2025 alone.
That is real capital and real conviction. It is the kind of investment U.S. government representatives spend years quietly encouraging.
It is also the kind of investment that puts a premium on how the expansion gets done. Uber Eats-style food delivery, for example, is a double-faceted business: the platform that signs up the most restaurants tends to own the most customers for the meals.
In situations such as this, the competitive temptation for a company like Uber is to lock in the supply side — to offer restaurants preferential commission terms in exchange for them not working with any other platforms.
It is an old playbook, and it tends to fall hardest on the smallest local businesses — in this case, Japanese restaurants and their customers, who have the least leverage to push back against a large multinational firm with the dominant share of the Japanese food delivery market.
This is not a theoretical concern, and it is not unique to Japan. In Australia, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is reportedly examining Uber Eats’ exclusive partnerships with major retail and food chains, looking at how contracts that grant the platform sole delivery rights affect competition for rival services. The same family of questions has been on the table in Japan for longer.
Japan, to its credit, has been alert to this. The country’s Antimonopoly Act prohibits exclusive dealing that hurts, or worse, drives out competitors, and the Japan Fair Trade Commission has been willing to act.
It raided Amazon Japan in 2016 over parity clauses imposed on third-party sellers. It raided Airbnb Japan in 2017 over suspected exclusivity provisions. And it opened a fresh inquiry into Amazon Japan in late 2024 over preferential placement tied to pricing concessions.
The pattern is consistent. Japan watches foreign platforms carefully, and it does not assume good behavior.
American trade policy is built on the proposition that other countries should give our companies a fair shake. We make that case in every bilateral conversation we have. It is a strong argument, and it is strong precisely because we believe it cuts both ways.
This is a principle Uber itself has recently been vocal in defending. The company sued its largest American rival earlier this year, alleging that DoorDash uses coercive tactics to lock restaurants into exclusive first-party delivery contracts, and a California judge has allowed the case to proceed.
In response to the ruling, an Uber spokesperson said restaurants deserve “transparency and freedom of choice” and that being forced into unfair terms “isn’t competition — it’s coercion.” Fair enough. That principle, then, should be applied consistently.
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If American companies were to use their scale abroad to do things we would not tolerate at home, things our own Federal Trade Commission would have something to say about, it would not just be a problem for the company involved, but it would weaken every American negotiator at every table, for years.
Identifying if, when, and how this is going should be the work of regulators and reporters. But the question is worth keeping in mind — by the boards and shareholders of American platform companies, by the American business press that covers them, and by anyone who cares about the durability of the American commercial brand abroad.
Max Rose is a former member of Congress who represented New York’s 11th Congressional District.
