earticle

영어

For consumers to engage in their daily consumption activities, they must purchase goods and services from businesses. Currently, the dominant transaction methods are mail-order sales and e-commerce. To protect consumers in this non-face-to-face transaction market, the E-Commerce Act was enacted in 2002. However, as the law primarily regulates traditional mail-order sales rather than focusing on e-commerce, it fails to adequately reflect the evolving transaction environment. Therefore, to ensure consumer protection in the non-face-to-face transaction market, the E-Commerce Act must be comprehensively revised. In this regard, the 22nd National Assembly has proposed various amendment bills. These efforts reflect the increasing consumer damages related to e-commerce and highlight the direct and indirect limitations of the current law. Furthermore, e-commerce is not a fully established transaction method but one that continuously evolves. To ensure consumer protection aligns with these changes, the E-Commerce Act must undergo ongoing revisions. However, the amendment bills proposed in the 22nd National Assembly, particularly the comprehensive amendment bills, fail to address the fundamental issues of the E-Commerce Act. Instead, they merely reintroduce previous amendment proposals without fully understanding the functions of online platforms. As such, these proposals do not provide fundamental solutions. Thus, a new amendment bill must be introduced to transform the E-Commerce Act into a law that effectively protects consumers in e-commerce and other non-face-to-face markets. This requires a precise analysis of the current state of the non-face-to-face transaction market. In particular, amendment bills should not focus solely on administrative regulations, as doing so would be insufficient to protect consumer rights and contradict efforts to empower consumers to protect their own interests. Instead, amendments should incorporate both judicial regulations and administrative oversight in a balanced manner. Finally, one of the main reasons why the comprehensive amendment bills proposed in the 20th and 21st National Assemblies, as well as the legislative proposal announced by the Korea Fair Trade Commission, were ultimately discarded is that they did not adequately reflect the opinions of stakeholders and lacked professional expertise. Considering this, the 22nd National Assembly must develop a comprehensive amendment bill through expert consultation and stakeholder participation to ensure a more effective and well-informed legislative revision.