이동통신서비스이용계약에서 지원금 규정의 배경과 개선방안에 관한 연구

Number of mobile communication subscribers surpassed our population in 2010. The communication industry became saturated as an oligopoly market and subsidy marketing to breakaway other company users triggered the so-called “mobile phone crisis”, which expanded user discrimination issue into a social phenomenon. What began as consumers’ feeling of relative loss grew into recognition of opaque and discriminative subsidy provision, something that distorts consumer welfare distribution and a hindrance that harms the healthy development of the mobile communication market. In addition, different subsidy for purchases made at different times and different places for the same terminal consumers, difficulty of predicting terminal price changes, forcing high price plan contract as a condition of terminal subsidy provision, unnecessary excessive communication consumption by subscribing to a high priced plan to purchase terminal at a low price, wasting resources with frequent terminal purchases and increasing household communication expense all became the logical reasons for a stronger regulatory control on communication contract. Based on such situation the「Mobile Communication Terminal Distribution System Improvement Act」 was enforced on October 1, 2014; from the legislation process too much consideration of communication and manufacture businesses and insufficient discussion and rough-and-ready processing of contract legislation brought about controversy. Previously we have seen the enforcement of Handset Distribution Law, a stronger regulatory means that took place during the course of sacrificing the principle of free contract, ideology of contract law, in order to regulate maximum limits of subsidy provision. The appropriateness and efficacy of the law has been criticized since its enforcement by the media, consumer groups, and various research methodologies. The foundation of this study was the recognition of issues with the above said Handset Distribution Law and first contemplated upon the concept, legal nature, rights and responsibilities and contract structure between contract parties as theoretical basis of the mobile communication service contract then reviewed advanced studies on mobile communication service contracts. History of terminal subsidy regulation, status of interested parties’ reversion of profits, implementation background of Handset Distribution Law and its major details were then also reviewed. Problems of regulating Handset Distribution Law such as regulation on discriminative subsidy provision, regulation on subsidy limits, and subsidy notification regulation, etc, were clarified as the focus of the study. Lastly, improvement measures in consideration of the purpose of legislation and improvement of its efficacy were searched then proposed.