플랫폼 사업자 규제법안에 대한 비판적 검토

Abstract

The National Assembly is pushing for legislation that enforces various strong regulations on platform operators, assuming that they should strengthen their social responsibilities. The characteristics of these bills are to apply the economic regulations of the common telecommunications business operator to the platform operators who are value-added telecommunications business operator(imposing Charge, appraising the conditions of competition, and reporting and settlement of accounts) and strengthening social regulations(monitoring obligation, public advertising obligations, etc.). This study examined whether these strong regulatory initiatives of the National Assembly aimed at platforms were reasonable. In order to examine the feasibility, the legal characteristics of platform operators were first identified, and a critical review was made as to whether regulatory characteristics appropriate for such platform services were reflected in the amendment in accordance with constitutional values. First, the amendment that imposes a contribution to the platform operators for the provision of the broadcasting communication development fund is unconstitutional because it violates the principle of equality and proportionality principle in the Constitution. Next, establishing ‘a special type of value-added telecommunications business operator’, imposing an obligation to appraise the conditions of competition and report settlement of accounts to them, does not meet the intention of introducing the relevant system under the Telecommunications Business Act. Also, the revised bill on the Information and Communication Network Act, which imposes monitoring obligation on platform operators, is also likely to violate the principle of proportionality because it does not meet the minimum requirements of infringement and the balance of legal interests. The shortcomings of all these new regulations are that they ignore the characteristics of platform services that the concept of border can be dumped in the application of regulation. In order to regulate the platform business, the enforcement of the regulation should be ensured regardless of the domestic and foreign companies. This can be said to be essential for securing international competitiveness. However, the regulations proposed by the amendment can not be implemented by foreign operators who provide the same services to Korean nationals, and they are only applicable to domestic operators. Therefore, we can conclude that our congress constitutes a competitive market that is disadvantageous to our company.