[Bills in Focus] Fair practices in e-commerce, legal grounds for carbon capture tech

Proposed bill: Act on Protection of Digital Service Users

Proposed by Rep. Jung Pil-mo (Democratic Party of Korea)

● The rapid advancement of digital services has led to new forms of user rights infringement, highlighting the need for a new act to protect the rights of digital service users. This bill requires business operators planning to deliver personalized services to clearly inform users about how their browsing and search history is used. It also requires digital service providers that use algorithms to offer recommendation services to disclose the major criteria for information ordering.

Proposed bill: Act on the Promotion of Fair Competition in the Online Platform Market

Proposed by Rep. Park Sung-joon (Democratic Party of Korea)

● An increasing number of dominant online platform companies have been engaging in unfair trade practices, such as rising commission fees, shortchanging delivery fees, and discriminating store vendors. This bill aims to ensure fair competition in the online platform market by regulating the abuse of market-dominant positions and unfair brokerage transaction practices and creating measures to limit excessive expansion of market dominance.

Pending bill: Act on the Capture, Transportation, Storage, and Utilization of Carbon Dioxide

Proposed by Rep. Lee Chul-gyu (People Power Party)

● As part of its commitment to achieve carbon neutrality and net-zero emissions, the Korean government has been promoting industries that utilize carbon capture, storage, and utilization technologies. To further facilitate the growth of these emerging green industries, this bill defines CCUS business, excludes captured carbon dioxide and other resulting substances and products from being classified as wastes, and requires the government to formulate and execute master and implementation plans concerning carbon dioxide capture every five years.

Promulgated bill: Enforcement Decree of the Act on Restriction on Special Cases Concerning Taxation

Competent Authority: Ministry of Economy and Finance

● To bolster support for biomedical research and development, this bill reclassifies key biomedicine technologies from new growth engines and source technologies to national strategic technologies, allowing small- and mid-sized enterprises to receive tax credits of up to 50 percent of applicable costs for their research and development. These costs include expenses related to R&D on new biomedicine candidate substances, clinical pharmacological tests on new biomedicine, and the manufacturing of biomedicine substances and materials.

Administrative announcement: Partial Amendment to the Commercial Act

Competent Authority: Ministry of Justice

● This amendment introduces comprehensive electronic meeting and voting systems for general shareholders to address the issue of low attendance at shareholders’ meetings and reinforce shareholder rights. It also expands the appraisal rights of shareholders dissenting against the spinoff of significant business units and enables companies or dominant stockholders to deposit proceeds from transactions.

The Korea Herald republishes a weekly legislative report by local law firm DR & AJU LLC to provide the latest information on bills approved, proposed, pending and set to be promulgated. -- Ed.

---

For any queries about the bills, contact cr@draju.com.