■ Date: November 29, 2022 (Tuesday) 14:00

■ Venue: 12th Floor, SC Convention Center, Seoul

On November 29 (Tuesday at 2 PM), KISDI hosted a public debate at the Seoul SC Convention Center on the “necessity of amending the Telecommunications Business Act to meet the needs of the digital era”.

During the event, Director Lee Min-suk of KISDI’s Department of Telecommunications Competition Policy Research gave a talk titled ‘A Proposal to Amend the Telecommunications Business Act in Response to Changes in the Telecommunications Environment’. Chaired by Lee Won-woo, Vice-President of Planning at Seoul National University, the debate format mainly involved free discussions among experts from academia, research, consumer organizations, and industry.

To produce a concrete proposal for amending the act, KISDI formed an expert forum in July to study and evaluate this issue.

Director Lee explained that “we are living in a time of monumental changes because digitalization is taking place across every sector of the economy and society, and telecom services have become an essential part of people's lives”. Against this backdrop, the government must seriously examine the task of amending the Telecommunications Business Act if it wants to guide the continuous development of the country's telecom industry and nimbly navigate the telecom environment of the future.

Some of the ideas suggested by Director Lee included reforming the structure of the relevant law by changing the objectives, names, and organization of the statutes (i.e. how the articles and clauses should be organized); adding a provision on supporting self-regulatory organizations in order to foster the healthy growth of the telecom industry; adding a provision on expanding the number of agencies that are required to provide essential telecom facilities; adding a provision on promoting investments and competition by improving the policies related to the wholesale of cheap phones; securing digital safety by establishing the legal grounds for the mandatory submission of documents on the safety of telecom services; adding a provision on providing universal services; and, finally, adding a provision on user protection and user convenience (i.e. improving the current policies on mobile phone numbers and devices).

The Ministry of Science and ICT plans to use the diverse opinions and discussion conclusions collected at this public debate in establishing a draft plan for the revision of the Telecommunications Business Act. By taking this opportunity to publicize the revision of the Telecommunications Business Act and to explore potentially effective ideas for revising the law, the Ministry hopes that the revision will become a cornerstone of the effort to advance the country's telecom industry for the digital era.