The South Korean government will seek a common front with other members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to protect domestic information technology (IT) companies from unfair and predatory practices of global tech giants like Google and Amazon as well as stronger actions against piracy on software contents.

Korea’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy on Tuesday sponsored a debate ahead of setting its goals for WTO ministerial negotiations in the first half on e-commerce and digital trade. It shared its proposal to seek international standards to ensure fairer IT playing field against the dominance of multinational tech names like as Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, often dubbed as GAFA.

The WTO in 1998 began the discussion on the need to establish rules and regulations for digital trade referring to overall cross-border transactions using ICT, but it has failed to make any significant progress yet as the member countries have not agreement on how to identify the scope of digital trade and the objectives of an international agreement on digital trade.

The government said a set of international rules governing digital trade is urgently needed to prevent the big tech players from wielding their power and conducting discriminatory practices towards Korean firms who try to enter overseas countries.

The ministry plans to propose to set up Global Mydata Ecosystem with countries suffering from similar abusive practices of GAFA, which is aimed at establishing a data bank that manages personal information at the request of customers. Companies should pay the bank to use the information, which would strengthen data protection and prevent data abuse by the big multinational firms, it said.

By Lim Sung-hyun and Choi Mira

[ⓒ Pulse by Maeil Business Newspaper & mk.co.kr, All rights reserved]