Policy Transfer in Times of Techno Bureaucracy: South Korea’s Regulatory Response to the Online Intermediation Services

With the recent rapid growth in online intermediation services, the South Korean Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) proposed a bill in 2020 aiming to prevent unfair trade practices and promote innovation. Legislation of the bill has been proactively driven by the KFTC and is scheduled to be deliberated at the Parliament after being approved at the Cabinet meeting. The key ideas of the bill have been adopted from regulatory framework of the EU, who had long been a world leader in regulating the tech sector. This study explores how the Korean regulators made their regulatory choices and why they made such decision, from the perspective of cross-national policy transfer. In doing so, this paper analyzes the distinguished regulatory frameworks of the South Korean and EU regimes, as well as the different business landscapes of the two jurisdictions. Through the analysis, this study finds that policy transfer is seemingly an ‘easy’ tool but how it operates is much more complex, because every jurisdiction has a distinguishably unique environment –both in business and regulatory terms. The South Korean government’s attempt to adopt a new regulation from the EU framework misses numerous points as it decided to accelerate the legislation process instead of tailoring the law to the Korea-specific situation with more delicacy. The unclarity of the legislation also leaves burden to the business sector, but a significant learning is learned of policy transfer - that policy transfer can be used as an effective and convenient tool only if the ‘adopter’ takes a thorough and robust approach in preparing a policy strategy that is delicately tailored to the domestic business and regulatory environment.