국내정보통신서비스시장의 자유화와 미국의 개방압력

Deregulation in the domestic market of telecommunication and America's threat to open its market

The development of telecommunication technology makes possible the rapid delivery of information from the long distance and the manipulation of various information we thought impossible a few years ago. Such a phenomenon has an important effect on the modern life style. So modern society is often referred to as the society of information- telecommunication. Most of countries have so far recognized the telecommunication service as public goods which induces the market failure and need a large investment cost. Therefore the theory of natural monopoly that the government has to control this industry exclusively in order to minimize the investment cost and provide all people with basic services, is considered to be valid. However, the rapid economic growth and technology innovation makes telecommunication combined with computer technology, which accelerate the scope and speed of technology innovation and bring a variety of services necessary for the whole industry. Such a transformation which the information service is used as intermediate goods in the production activity, has developed economic structure into more soft one and has a decisive effect on the market structure. That is, the monopoly system underlying the principle of scale economy cannot meet the different information services that people demand. In that point, most of countries try to reform the market structure by introducing the competitive principle. The aim of this paper is, first of all, to introduce the situation, process and characteristics of telecommunication liberalization of the advanced countries-USA, Japan, Britain, France, German-and then not only to analyse the situation of Korean telecommunication & information market compared with the above country but to investigate the desirable direction of liberalization under America's threat to open the market.