Korea Telecom CEO Proposes Revamping the KCC

As reported by The Korea Times, Lee, Suk Chae, Chairman and CEO of Korea Telecom said last week that The Korea Communications Commission (KCC) might not be the right organization to guide the country's information technology policies forward.  While talking with panelists at a weekly forum of the National Strategy Institute, he suggested that the KCC's committee-based decision-making structure makes it less effective as a developer of national IT strategies than its predecessor, the Ministry of Information and Communication.  "The KCC is a meaningful organization, but it is based on the wrong fundamental philosophy," he said.  Furthermore,
``The KCC was planned as a neutral, independent agency, but now the body that even has commissioners named from opposition political parties now have the power to regulate IT. Communications is part of administration, and should not be a commission-based organization, and this has to be changed.''
The KCC was inaugurated last year as the country's first converged regulator for telecommunications and broadcasting. Currently, a committee of five, including the KCC chairman and four commissioners, two of them named by the ruling political party and the other two by the opposition, is empowered to make decisions.
``The vice chairman post rotates from the commissioners selected from the ruling political party and the opposition. This means that the leader of the opposition party can become vice commissioner and have the rights to attend administrative meetings, which is not right,'' Lee said.