유럽헌법학회

The purpose of this paper was to investigate the status quo of the law to improve the self-regulation of foreign Internet service providers on illegal and harmful Internet content, and to suggest improvement measures. In order to achieve this purpose, first of all, we examined the significance, necessity and type of self-regulation, its current status, and problems of law(II). In addition, improvement measures to improve the self-regulation of foreign Internet service providers were proposed(Ⅲ). The core of the discussion is as follows. First, it can be evaluated that Article 44-4 of the ‘Act on Promotion of Information and Communications Network Utilization and Information Protection, Etc.’ adopts the voluntary self-regulation type among the four types of self-regulation. However, criticism has been raised in domestic academia that this provision is difficult to play a role as a means to secure the effectiveness of self-regulation, and the current status of Korea Internet Self-Governance Organization(KISO) shows the limitations of this provision. We think that it is inappropriate to switch from the area of ​​voluntary self-regulation to mandatory self-regulation in a society where the tradition of self-regulation is weak, such as in our society. In addition, mandatory self-regulation is not faithful to the concept of self-regulation. Therefore, mandatory self-regulation is not an option in our current situation. If so, it makes sense to choose either approved self-regulation or conditionally compulsory self-regulation. Among them, we insisted on choosing conditional compulsory self-regulation. In order to implement this, the following provisions were proposed to be newly established: a statement of the principle of priority for self-regulation on content regulation, regulations on the establishment and enforcement of codes of conduct of Internet service providers, and application of government standards when the establishment and implementation of codes of conduct of Internet service providers does not meet the government standards, clarification of specific support measures for self-regulation by the government, and mandatory disclosure of self-regulation implementation efforts. Second, it was proposed to establish an extraterritoriality and domestic agent in order to accommodate foreign Internet service providers within this conditional compulsory self-regulation. Third, in order to increase the effectiveness of the regulation of illegal and harmful content, the establishment of a new regulation for compulsory business registration other than the ‘Telecommunications Business Act’ is not valid due to excessive regulation. However, it was recommended to improve the enforcement so that foreign Internet service providers can faithfully report according to Article 22 of the ‘Telecommunications Business Act’.