Seoul City Analyzes 630,000 Big Data Entries to Proactively Address 'Unfair Trade'

Identifying Signs of Unfair Trading in Advance Through Big Data Analysis and Establishing Proactive Measures
Frequent Mentions of Unfairness in the Culture and Arts Sector, Conducting Surveys and Developing Measures to Improve Trading Practices

[Asia Economy Reporter Lim Cheol-young] The Seoul Metropolitan Government announced on the 31st that it analyzed 630,000 cases of "unfair trade" big data mentioned over two years from 2019 to 2020 and decided to prepare focused inspections and support measures for sectors with frequent unfair trade based on the results. The purpose is to proactively identify various unfair trade practices occurring in the rapidly changing economic environment, such as the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic and the growth of the platform economy, and to establish preemptive countermeasures.

According to Seoul City, the big data analysis targeted approximately 630,000 data points containing keywords related to unfair trade mentioned in the media and SNS over two years. In 2019, the volume of unfair trade mentions was 276,380 cases, which increased by 29.4% to 357,685 cases in 2020.

The sector with the most significant increase in data volume in 2020 compared to 2019 was "online platforms" (65%), followed by "culture and arts," which increased by 27%. When the entire data was divided into seven sectors with many "Gap-Eul" relationship victims, the culture and arts sector accounted for the highest proportion at 76.3%, followed by online platforms (16.3%), subcontracting transactions (2.7%), franchise transactions (1.9%), transactions among large, medium, and small enterprises (1.2%), agency transactions (0.9%), and large-scale distribution transactions (0.6%).

In particular, by extracting 206 news articles with many comments and analyzing the issues and disputes by sector, it was found that the culture and arts sector had many cases related to copyright theft, while concerns about monopolies by platform companies were prevalent in the online platform sector.

Based on the results of this big data analysis, Seoul City plans to conduct a field survey in the second half of the year starting with the culture and arts sector, which had the most mentions of unfair trade, and prepare countermeasures accordingly. Additionally, to protect the copyrights of cultural artists and ensure fairness in profit distribution, the city plans to establish "Culture and Arts Fair Trade Guidelines" by industry and apply them starting with the city and its affiliated organizations.

Han Young-hee, Seoul City's Labor, Fairness, and Coexistence Policy Officer, said, "Through the big data analysis related to unfairness, we were able to identify issues that citizens are actually experiencing," adding, "Starting with the culture and arts sector, which had the most mentions of unfair trade in the big data, we will prepare remedies and preemptive measures for various sectors."