Conference Agenda

In current debates on digital infrastructure governance, including artificial intelligence, a central question is where regulatory boundaries should be drawn across technological layers and how obligations should be allocated accordingly. Yet comparative-historical analyses of telecommunications regulation, which confronted related governance problems much earlier, remain relatively limited. This paper examines how existing telecommunications regimes were incrementally restructured through regulatory change and uses the development of data communications as a historical reference point for these debates.

More specifically, the paper compares the U.S. Computer Inquiry series (I–III, 1971–1986) with Korea’s sequence of data communications reforms: the early formation of data communications policy in the 1980s, the comprehensive revision of the Telecommunications Business Act in 1991, and the 1997 amendment. It asks how regulatory boundaries between telecommunications services and data services were formed and adjusted over time, and how these changes reorganized the relationship between the existing telecommunications regime and the emerging data communications sector. In the United States, the Computer Inquiry series can be understood as a cumulative process of regulatory redefinition around the boundary between telecommunications and data processing. In Korea, the relevant reforms can be read as a connected sequence involving the early organization of data communications policy, the institutionalization of the facilities-based/value-added service distinction, and the later adjustment of competition and interconnection rules.

The paper addresses three questions. First, under what combinations of external pressure, regime resistance, niche readiness, and actor strategies did regulatory changes concerning data communications emerge in the United States and South Korea? Second, how did these changes, operating cumulatively through sequential regulatory interventions, restructure the existing telecommunications regime and its competitive order? Third, when the same policy problem—where to draw the line between telecommunications services and data services, and how to create regulatory space accordingly—was addressed through different governance pathways, what differences emerged in the pace and pattern of regime restructuring?

Methodologically, this study uses a Force Balance Framework grounded in the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP). It applies a structured codebook that captures four dimensions of regulatory change: landscape pressures, regime resistance, niche readiness, and actor strategies. This approach makes it possible to identify how factors operating at different levels—including international pressure, privatization, domestic industrial policy, and technological maturity—combined in specific configurations to enable regulatory change and regime restructuring.

The paper makes three contributions. First, it reinterprets the history of data communications regulation not as a byproduct of technological progress or competition policy, but as a history of regime restructuring. Second, by analyzing the accumulation of sequential regulatory changes rather than isolated events, it offers a comparative-historical account of how adjustments to the existing telecommunications regime became linked to the institutionalization of the data communications sector in the two national cases. Third, in relation to ongoing debates in AI governance—especially those concerning boundary-setting and the allocation of obligations between model layers and downstream applications—the paper provides a comparative-historical reference framework for understanding under what conditions such boundary-setting becomes possible and what institutional effects it may produce.