통신서비스분야 공익성심사에 관한 고찰: 한미 제도 및 한미 FTA 양허

초록

Until recently, Korea has paid less attention to the qualitative regulation on foreign participation in its telecommunications services market due to its age-long policy basis of quantitative regulation. However, foreign investments subsequent to market-opening induced by WTO negotiations on basic telecommunications, national debt moratorium and telecom privatization, have awakened internal concern about the necessity of qualitative regulation, which finally resulted in the introduction of public interest tests into public telecommunications services in early 2004. Furthermore, KORUS FTA completed this year is scheduled to address a full-scale transformation of regulation from quantitative regulation to qualitative, since Korea made commitments of relaxing its existing foreign ownership restrictions conditioned with new public interest tests.Unfortunately, academia does not come up with the rapid changes around us. Korea's late adoption of public interest tests might explain the difficulty in finding relevant researches. In this context, this paper seeks to analyze the current regime and future direction of public interest tests with some implications hammered out. Considering that an important nature of KORUS FTA is to harmonize the regulatory schemes between the two trading partners, including public interest tests, it reviews in the first place the US' public interest tests in telecommunications services sector. In reference to the outcomes obtained from US' case, this paper snapshots Korea's current public interest tests regime and deals with the anticipated changes in accordance with KORUS FTA commitments.

키워드