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Staff Reporter
Lee Suk-chae, chairman and chief executive of telecommunications giant KT, said Wednesday that the Korea Communications Commission (KCC) might not be the right organization to guide the country's information technology policies forward.
Talking with panelists during a weekly forum by the National Strategy Institute, Lee suggested that the KCC committee-based decision-making structure makes it less effective as a developer of national IT strategies when compared to its predecessor, the Ministry of Information and Communications.
``The KCC is a meaningful organization, but it is based on the wrong fundamental philosophy,'' Lee said during the event held at the Korea Federation of Banks building in downtown Seoul.
``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.''
Lee's comments were considered a surprise, as the former information and communications minister, who took the management helm of KT earlier this year, had been known for his close working relationship with the KCC leadership.
Despite protests from telecom rivals, the KCC was swift in approving KT's merger with its mobile unit, KTF, in March, allowing the fixed-line telephony and Internet giant to better leverage its dominance into the mobile sector.
After bulking up, KT, which has been struggling from a decline in voice revenue in past years, is preparing to renew its industry competition with SK Telecom, the mobile telephony king.
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.
thkim@koreatimes.co.kr
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