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Date: 2000-11-04

KR: Cyberlaws, Kontrolle und Zensur


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Warum sollte es zum Beispiel in Korea anders sein, als
überall sonst wo auf der Welt? Der alte Krake Staat greift
nach dem Netz - so wie es weiter unten aussieht mit allen
verfügbaren Fangarmen zugleich.

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relayed by Fri, 3 Nov 2000 11:46:21 -0500 From: "CJFE"
<cjfe@cjfe.org>

---- Original Message ----- From: "della"
<della@www.jinbo.net> Sent: Wednesday, November 01,
2000 7:27 AM Subject: [Jinbonet] update in the struggle for
Internet Rights


Dear friends,

This is updated news from jinbonet about the struggle for
Internet Rights in South Korea. We're very pleased for your
warm solidarity messages we've got with advises and
resources.

The page for this issue is (in Korean): http://freeonline.or.kr in
English : http://freeonline.or.kr/english

In Solidarity, Jinbonet

* This article was presented in ASEM 2000 NGO meeting in
Seoul by Chun, Eung-Hwi (ehchun@PeaceNet.OR.KR)

-------------------------------------------------------------

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 ineff
ective, 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.










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edited by
published on: 2000-11-04
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