Welcome to BASE21

Now in Korea, there are emerging a few attempts of Ministry of Information and Communication to regulate cyberspace. These attempts, in part, respond to the real need of people and society in general, and are also closely related to seeking the self-interest of the governmental department. In last a decade of the term of building communication infrastructure, that department could have handled a sizable sum of national budget for these huge projects and become one of the most attractive departments among governmental officials. However, today when the technology of information and communication is widely provided and used by most people - so information society is becoming a matter of fact, the status and role of this department has sharply changed because in all aspects of our lives, electronic communication network is operating as a basic condition for doing all works and only management of infrastructure remains to be a routine work of that department. Concretely, the use of new technology for educational area has become the affairs of Ministry of Education and electronic commerce has become a work of Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy. To make it worse, unfortunately, in Korea, the cooperation among the concerned departments is rarely achieved. Accordingly when the reform plan of governmental organization had been suggested in the wake of this government, those officials of the MIC must have been shocked at the fact that the existence of the MIC had dropped out in the list of government departments.

Last month, the MIC announced the plan of the revision of the existing "Law for Promoting the use of information and communication network and etc.", that is renamed as "Law for Imposing Order in Cyberspace" by NGOs due to its clear and bad intention. The total number of provisions of this revised bill was expanded into mostly three times than that of the present law. In looking roughly into it, we can easily know, it says that there must be very unique and important three fields for the MIC to continue to deal with in information society - those are areas of the protection of privacy, the contents regulation and the management of Internet domainname and protocols in information and communication network. Since the public hearing of this revised bill in July 20, thirty or more NGOs have strongly struggled against this bill mainly because it could lead the MIC to censor the whole cyberspace and finally to infringe the basic rights of free speech of netizen. Many cyber-communities and individuals represented their fierce opposition to the bill in various ways - some have written down their messages repeatedly on the bulletin board of the MIC homepage and some other people had excercised a virtual sit-in at the planned date and time in a way of repeatedly pressing reload button of browsers in visiting the MIC website. Once, MIC web server system had temporarily been shutdown and it accused the cause of the accident of this online demonstration activity and charged it as a disturbance of governmental official activities. However, after investigation, its cause was confirmed as the fault of the equipments in MIC server system.

In the midst of debates, the most highlight issue was the rating system. The MIC has argued that they devised the autonomous rating system, but according to this bill if there are some harmful contents to youngsters on certain websites, which are to be judged by the subsidiary organization of the authority, it can enforce the particular level of rating to those sites as a legal duty. And this duty could be applied to any kind of information sources over all server systems within Korea regardless of whether it has commercial or noncommercial or individual purposes. Thus it is in itself no doubt a sensorship over cyberspace. However, it must be very ineffective, if it is to be applied, because it cannot touch other information sources located out of Korea. And if those harmful sites want to continue to operate targeted for Korean people, they will move their server system to foreign country so as to escape the legal sanction within Korea.

Some revised provisions of the bill especially about privacy protection are also favourable to business groups' interests rather than consumers'. It eases the rigid conditions of the present law in the transfer of personal information in case of M&A, and opens the continuous usability of the collected personal information even after the original purpose of the collection had already been accomplished off. Moreover, this bill gives the authority of management of Korean internet domainname (.KR) to the Ministry of Information and Communication , and also establishes the dispute arbitration committee as a legal body. This structure of internet governance is very unique in the world and upsets the present civic decision making process within KRNIC. In recent days, the MIC is additionally suggesting a bill of protecting the public communication infrastructure and there it prohibits a pattern of online demonstration - the action of repeatedly pressing reload button of web browsers at a certain site, regarding it as a behavior threatening the security of public facilities. However, this behavior is very well-known online action and free speech in cyberspace.

In fact, most of these issues are very new and strange to people in general. Also, even in civil society groups, these issues are emerging nowadays. Still there are many different perspectives and opinions on individual issues among NGOs. Many of those civic groups don't know well the characteristics of these new issues and how to deal with it. In this situation, government's strong drive for regulating cyberspace is very challenging. Online communities, who have not yet had any positive relations with the existing NGOs at all, responded voluntarily to this challenge and rather it stimulated NGOs to take concrete initiatives against the government's attempts. However, how to regulate or deregulate cyberspace requires to converge public opinions from diverse social groups. It means that the present NGOs should not simply cooperate with online communities but also promote the awakening of these new issues within civil society. Now, the most urgent task is obviously to oppose those proposed bills but in future and in longer term, civil society groups should form a network so that new emerging challenges could be seriously discussed and converge a variety of opinions on those issues within our society. Cyberspace is rapidly emerging as a new land and horizon faced by civil society movements