Study on Legislative Trends and Prospects of the Online Platform Act

Today, as online platform transactions become active, there is an urgent need for new legislation, tentatively known as the Online Platform Act, to regulate illegal activities of business operators that undermine fairness on online platforms and provide effective protection for consumers. This is because, even though traditional online commerce has become widespread as an online platform transaction, the E-Commerce Act, which was enacted and implemented 20 years ago, is still applied. In enacting the Online Platform Competition Promotion Act, the Fair Trade Commission is trying to introduce a pre-designation system that intensively regulates large operators through pre-designation of ‘dominant online platform operators’, which is receiving backlash from the platform industry. In other words, the government is trying to ban unfair practices such as preferential treatment and multi-homing restrictions by dominant operators by introducing this pre-designation system in the new Online Platform Act. The Fair Trade Commission’s legislative direction to pre-designate platform operators such as Google and Naver as dominant operators in order to regulate large platform operators has been disclosed, but the specific details of the bill have not yet been disclosed. In general, the key contents will be the regulation of unfair practices by platform operators, consumer protection, and designation of platform dominant operators. Through this legislation on the Online Platform Act, we will quickly respond to illegal acts in the platform market, thereby increasing the preventive effect. In addition, this will alleviate the economic burden on small business owners and consumers in the platform market, while revitalizing the market entry and activities of platform operators such as startups, which will lead to innovation and strengthening of competitiveness in the platform industry. In any case, although the industry is protesting against the pre-designation of the platform dominant operator, we hope that a more thorough review will be conducted and the legislation will be completed by reflecting the opinions of the platform industry as much as possible.