[The Editors' Verdict] Outdated Communication Fee Election Pledges

One of the recurring pledges during every presidential election is the reduction of communication fees. However, ahead of this 20th presidential election, it has not attracted much attention. The People's Solidarity for Participatory Democracy's Livelihood Hope Headquarters urged presidential candidates to prepare a pledge for halving LTE communication fees, citing that the three mobile carriers have made excess profits of 18 trillion won over the past 10 years through LTE services. A month has passed, but no candidate has adopted this as an election pledge yet. This is probably because the claim is so absurd.

President Moon Jae-in pledged to abolish the basic fee during the 19th presidential election campaign but failed to fulfill this promise after being elected. It is said that he pulled out the abolition of the basic fee as a policy to attract public attention to reverse an unfavorable situation in the election polls at the time. After taking office, he made tremendous efforts to implement it, but it ultimately failed due to concerns over violating market economy principles and constitutional issues.

Meanwhile, candidate Lee Jae-myung proposed communication fee-related pledges such as "half-price communication fees for soldiers" and "safe data." The half-price communication fee for soldiers is a plan to increase the discount rate on communication fees up to 50%, and safe data guarantees free data usage at a minimum speed even after all basic data is used up. Similar services to safe data are already being sold by telecom companies at around 3,000 to 5,000 won per month, but he promises to provide this free of charge to the entire population. Both pledges involve direct government intervention in communication fees, which violates the principles of a free market economy. If fees are to be reduced, the government should allocate a budget to cover the amount and implement it. South Korea is now a developed country. Populist pledges that violate market economy principles should be stopped.

Reducing household communication fees is something all citizens want. However, the government cannot force private telecom companies to lower their fees. Instead of directly enforcing the abolition of basic fees or fee reductions, the government can reduce communication fees through institutional improvements. A representative example is MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network Operators). Introduced in 2011, MVNOs lease telecom networks cheaply from carriers and resell them to general consumers. Consumer fees are about 30-50% cheaper compared to carrier plans. Since MVNOs use the carriers' networks as is, the communication quality is the same. Perhaps because of this, recent statistics show that the burden of household communication fees continues to decrease. According to the annual Household Expenditure Survey published by Statistics Korea, the average monthly communication fee per household has steadily decreased over the past three years from 2018 to 2020.

Until now, the responsibility for reducing communication fees has been placed solely on domestic telecom companies. Giant companies like Google and Netflix generate enormous profits by using most of the global wired and wireless network data traffic but refuse to pay network usage fees. The investment costs for network expansion to handle increased traffic fall entirely on telecom companies. It is worth considering whether it is fair to demand the cost of accessing digital culture solely from telecom companies.

Communication networks, which are the fundamental basis of the digital transformation and the 4th Industrial Revolution, are extremely important, and building communication infrastructure requires astronomical investments. The digitalization and online-centered social structure are also becoming more solid. Looking around, the current digital ecosystem is much more complex and diverse than in the past. Consumer groups also need to change their perspective. From this presidential election onward, it is necessary to look beyond simply reducing communication fees and consider a comprehensive perspective of expanding citizens' digital access rights.

Im Juhwan, Honorary President of the Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences