Back to the past to advance to the future?: Korean new regime plans to dismantle the Ministry of Information and Communication

Recently, the transition team for Lee Myung-Bak, the President-elect, announced that it would set about to examine government organizations to retrench and reshuffle under the next regime. As one of what they consider is to dismantle the Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC) and transfer its functions to the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy (MCIE) and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism (MCT), there is a growing concern about its effects on IT industry and market.

Related organizations with the MIC strongly resist the proposal of the transition team to dismantle the MIC. IT industry also expresses itself against the proposal in the concern that if the MIC disappears, IT industry could be wilted.

In this tenor, twenty seven the MIC-related organizations jointly announced on Tuesday that "abolishing the MIC by transferring its functions to other Ministries, like a department store, is contrary to all opinions involved in IT industry."

Instead, they emphasized the necessity to "expand and reorganize the MIC enable to assume full charge of IT policy functions that lay scattered in other Ministries, in order to maximize IT policy-making capacity and experience." They also argued that "the creation of future technology, such as the second Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) and Wireless Broadband (Wibro), is possible only by fostering communication broadcasting services, contents, and digital-fusion industry, together as one ecosystem. It is also an urgent task to advance media administrations suitable for media-fusion trends."

In the time of change for communication-broadcasting fusion, the solution is not to dismantle but to reconstruct professionally

There have been some overlapping works between the MIC and the MCIE. Many parts of digital contents have been in charge of the MCT. Considering these divisions of works on the basis of the retrenchment of government organizations, the transition team seems to pick out the card of the disorganization of the MIC.

By contrast, the MIC under the present regime already has a roadmap to evolve itself to a new communication-broadcasting fusion organization by dismantling itself. If new media-communication industries, such as IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) and DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting), become the next generation services, the existence of the MIC-like-organization is infallibly necessary.

If the proposal of the transition team is realized, future confusion could be unavoidable. One argues that the development of new IT fusion type of contents will become difficult because content and IT/communication-broadcasting policies are separately managed by the MCT and the MCIE, respectively.

According to Suh Seung-Mo, the chairman of Korea IT SME & Venture Business Association, "while competing foreign countries have been establishing IT related government organizations, Korea is likely to go back against this international trend. If so, it will discredit the Korean image of IT superpower that we have built." In fact, Japan has established the Ministry of Information and Communication. Australia is moving toward the same direction with Japan to establish an IT related government organization.

Parts of big companies that have IT related enterprises and foreign companies, which have enjoyed vested rights in Korea, are in an atmosphere not to express opposite opinions in the reason that they can escape from excessive regulations and interference, if the proposal is realized.

However, the proposal of the transition team is inappropriate for IT industry that needs systematic supports by specialized government agency in order to develop itself and maintain Korea¡¯s competitiveness in the world. There is also a widespread dim view of the proposal about how it could produce positive results, especially in an important turning point for IT industry to deal with significant issues, like communication-broadcasting fusion.