중소 소프트웨어 기업진흥을 위한 법정책 고찰 - 소프트웨어진흥법과의 관계를 중심으로 -

Abstract

Korea enacted the Software Industry Promotion Act, which was operated as a slightly different law for quite some time, and has been enacted repeatedly to reach today. The core of this law, as clearly revealed in Article 1, is that it focuses on the ‘promotion (promotion)’ and ‘industry’ of the software industry. The focus of the software industry continues to change with the times. In today’s era of artificial intelligence (AI), it is important to see that the focus is on the software-as-a-service (SaaS) type among the cloud industries. PaaS and IaaS should be considered to be next in priority after SaaS. This is because the market is much larger because the majority of people are operating SaaS. Also, for this reason, the companies that have taken the lead in subscriptions, that is, global IT giants, dominate and lead the market. The emergence of the subscription economy can be said to be in the same context. The subscription economy is often compared to the sharing economy, but there are significant differences. First, rather than ‘connection,’ the ‘supplier’ must provide consumers with an irresistible charm. Second, even if it results in consumers becoming de facto continuous debtors, it should be perceived as beneficial to consumers. In this sense of having an asymmetrical structure, the subscription economy should be an important subject of consumer law. Third, the sharing economy requires the existence of a platform, but suppliers of the subscription economy must become platforms themselves to succeed. As mentioned above, SaaS is likely to emerge as a major factor in determining the future society. It will also become an important factor in determining consumer utility. However, the problem is that large IT companies that have achieved global monopoly market dominance are likely to become key players. I believe that it is difficult to grow new and emerging companies in Korea. It has not been long since the Software Promotion Act attempted to create the scope of activities of small and medium-sized companies under the application of the law. The history of the law goes back to 1987. However, the ‘Guidelines on Support for Business Participation by Small and Medium-sized Software Businesses’, which is operated as an administrative rule (or notice), was first enacted in 2012 (this also had a name change). The Software Promotion Act already has legal provisions that can be used as a good means of supporting the activities of small and medium-sized enterprises. As for the table of contents within the Software Promotion Act, ‘Chapter 2 Software Promotion Policy’, ‘Chapter 3 Establishment of Software Industry Base’, and ‘Chapter 4 Software Convergence and Software Education’ are actually provisions for large software companies, but rather can be used as a basis for supporting small and medium-sized enterprises. In addition, there is ‘Chapter 5 Advancement of Software Business’. In particular, this Chapter 5 has Article 48 that explicitly refers to ‘small and medium-sized enterprises’. The author maintains a critical view that artificial support systems run the risk of creating the so-called Peter Pan syndrome. The author’s priority is the idea that supporting small and medium-sized enterprises is not important, because it can only produce zombies who depend on government subsidies. Even if it was a small business, if the company had grown enough, it should have graduated from the support target, but it is often mentioned that it did not graduate (in order to obtain government subsidies) or artificially split the company to pretend to maintain the small business form. The most important thing is to restore competition and maintain a competitive market where companies that can compete properly in the market emerge. The position is that the phenomenon of so-called conglomerate owners maintaining monopolistic market dominance in the market and destroying competition while blocking the entry of new competitors should be eliminated. I believe that the experience of powerful IT conglomerates emerging about 20 years ago, when there was no monopolistic dominance by large corporations in the first IT market, can be considered clear evidence.