South Korea to impose restrictions on Google and Apple
If the amendments to the Telecommunications Companies Law are approved, the technology giants will not be able to require developers to use their payment system
The South Korean Legislation and Justice Parliamentary Commission plans to approve the reforms to the Telecommunications Companies Law, which includes aspects related to the collection of commissions. Companies like Google and Apple will not be able to require software developers to use their payment systems, no longer getting commissions for “in-app purchases”.
If the commission approves the legislative reform on Tuesday, also known as the “anti-Google law”, it will be submitted to a final vote next Wednesday and those would be the first restrictions that technology companies would face by one of the strongest economies globally.
The law is focused on “application store operators with dominant positions in the market”, and parliamentarians, since mid-2020, have been pushing “the question of the structure of commission charges.”
If it becomes law, developers will have different options and will be able to select which independent payment systems they want to use.
Worldwide, both Google and Apple have received criticism and harsh criticism for demanding that developers use the payment systems of their companies, which charge up to 30 % commission for each of the purchases made.
Kwon Se-hwa, CEO of the Korea Internet Corporation Association, a non-profit group representing Korean technology companies, noted in the case of game applications, “Google has forced application developers to use its own payment system (…) and wants to extend its policy to other applications such as music or cartoons.”
Other nations are also managing legal aspects that allow them to put limits on the world’s technology companies, this is how in 2020 the European Union proposed the Digital Markets Law, which also aims to reduce the “commissions of the application stores”. However, some lawmakers want to “toughen it up to specifically target America’s tech giants.”
In the United States, three bipartisan deputies presented a project “that would stop the application stores of companies that, according to them, exercise too much control of the market, including Apple and Google.”
M. Rodríguez
Source: lanación.com
