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PROPOSAL for Application

for International Conference on Public Organization, Indonesia, January 2011

An Explanatory Study of the Uniqueness of Internet Security Regulatory

Policy in Korea: Origin, Impact, and Change

Gyuseong Park

Background

As the significance of Internet has been increased in people’s daily life, the importance of

security of Internet has been gradually enlarged. Korea, one of the country where Internet

is widely and effectively used in various ways, the insecurity of Internet transaction is not

just a simple incident. Thus, there are many security measures and regulation imposed by

Korean government emerged since the inchoate stage. It is clear that these security

measures have been contributed to the growth of Internet in Korea; because ensuring

security is the prerequisite of flourishing internet transactions.

But recently, there are lots of critiques from diverse point of view toward these Internet

security regulatory policies. Especially, there is a persuasive argument that the uniqueness

of this ‘Korean-style’ Internet security regulation which strictly requires its own plug-in

programs under certain platform instead of Web standard, not only created inconvenience

of Internet users, but contributed to the defects that external danger as observed in 2003,

and 2009 DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. Why the measures that intended to

prevent cracking and protect private information are criticized because of its negative

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impact on security? To analyze this, it is needed to observe the origin and impact of

Internet security regulations in Korea. Furthermore, this regulatory policy remarkably

changed in this year. It is not easier to detect all of the reason of this change, but it is

certain that this change is related to the shortcomings of regulatory policy.

Purpose

As mentioned above, this paper aims to analyze and argue the uniqueness of internet

security regulation in Korea, and its actual impact. Unfortunately, the authority did not

create a credible, and applicable source of quantitative data can be analyzed, and due to its

recent change, it is impossible to analyze the impact of change in 2010. Thus it is unable to

conduct a noteworthy quantitative analysis yet. Despite this limitation, This paper tries to

consider this regulation by encompassing various issues: internal and external constraints

in nascent stage of development of Internet in Korea, the behavioral pattern of Korean

Internet users, and external factors which contributed to its recent change.

By doing this, this paper is arguing that the uniqueness of Internet security regulation is

the result of the interplay of various visible and invisible institutions, especially technical

availability. Also, this paper claims that negative and paradoxical impact of regulation

apart from original intention is not a simple policy failure. Instead, this paper contends

that this phenomeon can be described as a result of ‘inertia’ of institutions while

technology has been being rapidly and continuously developed. In other words, the

reason is not wholly from the flaws of unique regulations, but mainly from the failure of

adapting new technologies.

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