• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
• /
• v.20 no.6
• /
• pp.143-156
• /
• 2019

Discussion on OTT regulation has become fiercer, as OTT services' impacts on the global and domestic media market have been exponentially growing. In South Korea, it is argued that, on the basis of the similarity between television program and OTT's video content, OTT needs to be regulated in order to protect fair competition and to control sociocultural effects. In many of the discussions, developed countries' cases have been used for supporting OTT regulation. In this paper, we first analyzed the global OTT market trends based on our own categorization of OTT services. then we assessed the validity of the application of the foreign cases in the current OTT regulation debates in Korea. We proposed six OTT types (aggregation, mediation, mediation-aggregation, multi-screen, outlet, and outlet-linear) simultaneously considering service operator' origin, business model, content format, and content delivery. These services have been consistently evolving, and the OTT market has been increasingly competitive especially around content differentiation. Regulators must be wary of hastily introducing competition regulation to the dynamically innovating OTT market. The foreign cases, including the US, EU, the UK, and Japan, hardly seem to be appropriate bases for strengthening OTT regulation. Rather, they were focused more on promoting competition in the domestic media market and enriching the content ecosystem. Therefore, we need to consider revision of the outdated media regulation frameworks instead of fitting OTT under them, and to recognize the priority of securing practical jurisdiction on global service providers before capturing local players into the conventional regulation systems.