Trusted Web White Paper (English Version)

The Cabinet Office of the Government of Japan has made available an English translation of the “Trusted Web” whitepaper, which was initially published in Japanese in November 2023. The following is the executive summary.

Background

• Amid digitalization of social and economic activities, various pain points have emerged, including concerns over data reliability due to fake news and disinformation generated by generative AI, the infringement of privacy, excessive dependence on specific services in the winner-takes-all situation, and siloed industrial data that is underutilized.
• When the society is transitioning to a “digital society,” the Internet and the Web do not ensure trust relationships and sense of security in social activities. Therefore, we must rebuild trust on the Internet and the Web.
• In the current trust framework, the portion where data transactions can be verified are limited, and which leaves us no choice but to trust digital platform operators, etc. without checking supporting facts. We also rely on them for identifier mechanisms to link data.
• The “Trusted Web” concept was proposed at the Digital Market Competition Council of the Cabinet Secretariat, and in October 2020, the “Trusted Web Promotion Council,” consisting of experts from industry and academia, was established. Discussions have been conducted while repeatedly presenting and fleshing out the concept, receiving feedback from use cases, as well as taking international trends into consideration.

What is the Trusted Web?

• The Trusted Web is an initiative to build a new trust framework that provides mechanisms without excessively relying on specific services, for enabling users (individuals and organizations) to keep control of the data related to themselves and to verify the exchanged data and the parties with whom the data is exchanged.
• Through this, we aim to build a new trust framework for various social activities in digital society by adding certain governance and operational mechanisms, and to realize the creation of new values by various parties.
• In addition, building the trust framework in data exchange through the Trusted Web is extremely important for facilitating “business-to-business collaboration,” which is a prerequisite for promoting digital transformation (DX) that requires various entities to collaborate across industries and sectors. Furthermore, the Trusted Web will ultimately contribute to the realization of “Data Free Flow with Trust” (DFFT).

Path toward realization

• Through pilot projects, etc., various use cases will be created, and shared and discussed with related parties inside and outside Japan, leading to the creation of new businesses through initiatives in line with the direction the Trusted Web should take, and promoting international collaboration.
• Various services that embody the mechanism that the Trusted Web aims are provided, and their areas of use are expanding. In the process, APIs, data models, and protocols that should be compatible would be identified while utilizing existing mechanisms to improve trust. The commonization of these will lead to interoperability and standardization, and is expected to materialize the Trusted Web.

Progress since the White Paper ver. 2.0 (published August 2022)

• Through the “Pilot Project for Realization of Trusted Web” in FY2022 and other programs, the benefits and challenges of various use cases being materialized by private companies and others were shared, and materials were provided to help companies find points of contact with their own business, leading to the creation of new businesses.
• By organizing the practices and implementation methods necessary to implement the Trusted Web and publishing on GitHub, engineers and others will be able to grasp concrete examples, discuss and update them with each other for service development.
• Based on feedback from the pilot projects , the architecture was restructured and the governance supporting it as the two wheels of the cart was presented.

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