South Korea’s Response to the U.S. Reassessment of Digital Regulations
— The Political Economy of U.S.-Korea Digital Platform Conflicts —
Lee Myungho
President, KCERN; Advisor, Korea Association for Futures Studies
The United States is a country that constitutionally guarantees the world’s most powerful “freedom of expression.” Yet that same nation has been wielding severe sanctions against other countries’ online regulation laws. The U.S. Department of State’s “Agency Strategic Plan for Fiscal Years 2026–2030,” released in early 2026, declared that should foreign governments pursue content regulation legislation, the U.S. would employ coercive measures including visa restrictions, financial pressure, and trade negotiation linkages.
The U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) also officially classified Korea’s amendments to the Network Act and the Online Platform Act as “discriminatory trade barriers against U.S. companies” in the National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers 2026 published the same year.
However, this conflict is not merely a bilateral U.S.-Korea trade dispute. It reveals that Korea is no exception to a global problem: the collision between platform capitalism and the democratic public sphere. Yet the United States is behaving differently within its own borders. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is currently pursuing antitrust litigation against Meta and Amazon.
While acknowledging the need to regulate Big Tech at home, the U.S. criticizes Korea’s similar attempts as “suppression of freedom.” This article analyzes the political-economic structure of this double standard and examines the principles Korea should pursue.
“Freedom of Expression” Has Become the Language of Trade Coercion
The U.S. framing of other countries’ platform regulations as “violations of freedom of expression” is not a story unique to Korea. When the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) was under discussion, and when Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code was passed, the United States resisted using the same language.
When this repeated pattern is analyzed from a political-economic perspective, one clear structure emerges: the State Department’s “digital freedom” discourse and USTR’s trade pressure operate as a dual-channel mechanism that effectively functions as a diplomatic shield protecting the overseas market dominance of U.S. platform companies such as Google, Meta, and Amazon.
The United States—where the FTC is pursuing antitrust litigation against Meta and where Congress is debating Big Tech regulation bills—and the United States that criticizes Korea’s similar attempts as “censorship” are the same country. This self-contradiction is not merely policy inconsistency, but rather strategic asymmetry: regulating monopolies at home while protecting the same monopolies abroad.
The USTR report’s reference to the Network Act—citing “discriminatory burdens unfavorable to U.S. platform companies”—is a self-confession that the real concern is business interests, not freedom of expression.
That said, there are points in the U.S. argument worth heeding. If the legal definition of “disinformation” in the amended Network Act is vague, the risk that it could be weaponized to suppress legitimate political dissent is real. How similar laws have operated in authoritarian regimes like Russia and Singapore should serve as historical cautionary tales. However, what this concern points to is not “withdraw the regulation” but rather “design the safeguards more rigorously.”
Algorithms Treat Disinformation as Fuel for Profit, Not a Bug
Let us examine the empirical reality accumulating behind the “freedom of expression” argument. According to a study published in Science in 2018 by Vosoughi et al. at MIT Media Lab, false information spreads six times faster than true information. Platform sharing and recommendation functions structurally accelerate this speed.
In 2021, Meta whistleblower Frances Haugen made a historic disclosure before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee. Facebook’s internal research had already revealed that its algorithms prioritize the exposure of hate speech and disinformation, increasing user engagement time and advertising revenue. The company knowingly tolerated this for corporate profit.
This structure is the product of intentional design. Content that provokes outrage and fear generates far higher engagement rates than neutral information, and that engagement rate translates directly into advertising revenue. In an engagement-based revenue model, disinformation functions less like a side effect or bug and more like a feature.
The Oxford Internet Institute’s (OII) 2020 report found that this “computational propaganda” operates at an industrial scale in over 81 countries, with algorithms serving as amplifiers.
Examples of disinformation destroying democracy are not abstract. In the Cambridge Analytica scandal exposed in 2018, a British data consulting firm illegally harvested data from 87 million Facebook users and used it for psychological targeting advertising in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The UK Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Committee issued a strong warning in its 2019 final report, calling it a serious threat to democratic processes.
In January 2023, Bolsonaro supporters who believed disinformation about election fraud stormed and vandalized the Brazilian Congress, Presidential Palace, and Supreme Court. It was the most vivid real-world example of algorithmic disinformation being converted into a physical democratic crisis.
Regulation Is Not Suppression—It Is a Prescription to Restore Democracy and Markets
John Stuart Mill, the classical liberal philosopher, proposed the Harm Principle in On Liberty (1859): the only legitimate basis for the exercise of state power over individual liberty is to prevent harm to others. While frequently cited as a basis for freedom of expression, it simultaneously specifies its limits. If algorithms amplify disinformation to the point of undermining electoral fairness and inciting social violence, this falls squarely within the domain of state intervention that Mill’s principle permits. Freedom of expression is not a license to pollute.
The justification for regulation is equally clear in market economy logic. In the domestic app market, the combined market share of Google and Apple is estimated at approximately 85–95%—an extremely high level of concentration. Within this oligopolistic structure, app developers have virtually no choice in matters of fees, search visibility, and terms of service. This cannot be called a free market worth protecting.
The Online Platform Act’s prohibitions on self-preferencing, bundling, and multi-homing restrictions are not enemies of the free market—they are measures to restore a free market that has been undermined by monopoly. Reality has reached a point where platform regulation is necessary to uphold free market principles.
Brussels, London, and Canberra Are Already on the Same Path
Viewing this conflict as a bilateral “Korea vs. the U.S.” confrontation is shortsighted. The actual configuration is different. It should be reframed as “the alliance of democracies pursuing digital sovereignty” versus “the U.S.-Big Tech alliance protecting domestic platform hegemony.”
The EU fully implemented the Digital Services Act (DSA) in 2024, mandating algorithmic risk assessments, disinformation response reports, and external audits for very large platforms. Violations carry fines of up to 6% of global annual revenue. The Digital Markets Act (DMA) designated six companies—Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and ByteDance (TikTok)—as “gatekeepers” (dominant platforms acting as gatekeepers of the market) and banned self-preferencing.
The UK imposed obligations on platforms to assess harmful content risks through the Online Safety Act of 2023. Australia, through the News Media Bargaining Code of 2021, forced platforms to pay fair compensation to news publishers. At the time, Facebook responded with the extreme measure of completely blocking news sharing in Australia, only to reverse course within days amid international condemnation. It was a symbolic moment in which a giant platform retreated in its confrontation with a democratic nation.
The United States has applied similar pressure even on EU officials, but this has only served to accelerate U.S. isolation on the international stage. Just as the EU’s GDPR has become the de facto global standard for personal data protection, the DSA and DMA are likely to emerge as global standards for platform regulation. For Korea, aligning with this trend—even belatedly—is also strategically necessary in terms of cooperation with other “liberal democratic” nations.
On Principle, Not Fear—It Is Time to Establish Digital Sovereignty
Korea’s strategy in confronting U.S. pressure should be neither capitulation nor blind confrontation. It is about making clear the democratic direction of “freedom and markets” and “checks and balances.” Maintaining the principles of regulation while making its enforcement structure more refined and transparent.
An independent deliberative body should be established to prevent a government agency from monopolizing the judgment of disinformation, and transparency reporting obligations at the level of the EU’s DSA should be introduced. Procedural democracy is the path to simultaneously proving the legitimacy of institutions both domestically and internationally.
The tasks at the national, corporate, and civic levels are also clear. At the national level, Korea must strengthen digital regulatory cooperation with the EU, UK, and Australia, and persuade the international community that this conflict is a matter of global democratic governance—not a bilateral trade dispute.
At the corporate level, platform companies must move toward leading the way on the social responsibility of platform algorithms through self-regulation. At the civic level, citizens must become active and critical interpreters of information—grounded in digital literacy—rather than passively consuming algorithm-recommended content.
Digital sovereignty in the digital age encompasses not only territorial control but also control over the cyber public sphere. If the online space where public opinion is formed is designed according to the profit logic of algorithms, that democracy is merely leased to tech capital. Protecting democracy is not about restricting freedom of expression—it is about designing a public square where expression can compete fairly. We must create the rules for a square where civic voices gather, not where hatred is discharged.
[References]
• U.S. Department of State, Agency Strategic Plan for Fiscal Years 2026–2030 (2026)
• USTR, National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers 2026 (2026)
• Vosoughi, S. et al., “The spread of true and false news online,” Science (2018)
• Oxford Internet Institute (OII), Social Media Manipulation by Political Actors series
• Haugen, F., Testimony before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee (2021)
• UK DCMS Committee, Disinformation and ‘fake news’: Final Report (2019)
• European Commission, Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA) (2022–2024)