South Korea’s National Assembly is again debating an “online platform intermediary transactions fairness” bill that aims to protect merchants from unfair conduct by large platforms. The objective is understandable. The legislative design, however, is not—and in several respects, the bill raises even more serious concerns than comparable legislation, such as the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA).

As drafted, the bill introduced in December by Rep. Lee Jung-moon combines a troubling platform-only scope with a concentration of interpretation and enforcement authority in the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC), relying on broad “unfairness” standards backed by expansive corrective-order and surcharge powers. What’s more, its provisions include prescriptive operational mandates and quasi-financial custody obligations that depart sharply from global regulatory precedent and raise serious concerns about trade and non-tariff barriers.

Why the Bill Risks Becoming a Digital Non-Tariff Barrier

Platform-Only Scope Creates Disproportionate Trade Risk

First, the bill adopts a platform-only scope rather than an activity-based one. Similar to the DMA, the bill applies to “online platform intermediary transactions” and defines covered “online platform intermediary services” in a way that targets a specific category of platform intermediaries.

That design choice matters. Unlike activity-based regulation, which targets specific functions and risks across comparable actors, a platform-only approach concentrates compliance burdens on large platforms that sit at the center of cross-border commerce. Even if facially neutral, the practical impact is predictable: The largest platforms, many of them headquartered in the United States, are likely to bear the overwhelming share of the operational and financial compliance burden, while functionally similar intermediaries outside the statutory definition remain unaffected.

This has implications for trade. In November 2025, the United States and Korea publicly committed to ensuring that U.S. companies are not discriminated against and do not face unnecessary barriers in laws and policies affecting digital services, including online platform regulation. However, a platform-only statute that disproportionately targets U.S. platforms is precisely the type of design likely to be challenged as an unnecessary and disproportionate barrier.

Payments-Style Settlement and Custody Rules Go Beyond Competition Law

Second, the bill goes beyond the sorts of conduct rules found in the DMA and instead directly regulates things like settlement and custody mechanics that are typically addressed under payments law. For example, Article 10 of the bill requires that, where a platform receives and manages sales proceeds, including where management is outsourced to an electronic payment processing entity, the platform must pay out merchants within a statutory deadline. The bill also includes a phase-in period that temporarily extends the baseline payout deadline to 40 days in the first year after enforcement and 30 days in the second year.

Article 11 adds a fund-protection obligation. Platforms that manage sales proceeds must “separately manage” at least 50 percent of those funds through deposit at a financial institution or payment-guarantee insurance, with a transitional threshold of 30 percent during the first year.

Typically, digital antitrust regulations are designed to address potential exclusionary conduct, such as self-preferencing, that could distort competition. They do not prescribe market outcomes through measures like mandating settlement timelines, liquidity management, or safeguarding rules, which are not ordinarily addressed by competition law regimes. The result is a regulatory trajectory that goes beyond the DMA toward an even more heavy-handed and interventionist model, increasing both domestic compliance burdens and the risk of international trade friction.

The Bill’s Penalty Design Copies the DMA But Without Its Safeguards

Third, the bill imposes DMA-level fines without adopting the safeguards that accompany them. Specifically, at first glance, this bill appears to resemble the DMA by allowing penalties of up to 10 percent of worldwide turnover. The similarity, however, is largely superficial. While the DMA is itself controversial, it confines 10 percent fines to a narrowly defined set of designated “gatekeepers” and to an, in theory, closed list of obligations specified in the regulation. Importantly, enforcement decisions and fines under the DMA are subject to a clearly articulated system of judicial review through the EU courts.

Korea’s bill, by contrast, operates in a materially different legal context. It applies surcharges of up to 10 percent of relevant sales through broadly framed “unfairness” standards enforced by the KFTC, combined with expansive corrective-order authority. And, while enforcement decisions are formally subject to general administrative and judicial review, the statute does not establish a similarly explicit or tailored appeals framework for this new category of platform-specific obligations and penalty exposure.

That design choice is exacerbated because, as noted above, the bill is not limited to classic exclusionary-conduct rules. At bottom, it pairs high penalty exposure with platform-only scoping and operational mandates and funds-management obligations that the DMA itself does not impose. In practice, this is a recipe for problematic and harmful regulation.

From a trade perspective, the concern is therefore not just about the penalty level alone, but the combination of severe financial exposure, platform-only scope, and open-ended enforcement standards. Together, these features increase legal uncertainty for foreign firms, heighten the risk of disproportionate impact on cross-border business models, and undermine regulatory predictability—all key factors in assessing whether a measure functions as an unnecessary or discriminatory non-tariff barrier.

A More Defensible Path Is Available

If Korea seeks a globally credible competition law framework, it should avoid implementing a model of digital antitrust regulation that is, in many ways, even more intrusive than the DMA. Settlement risk and fund safeguarding, if they are genuine policy concerns, should be addressed through payments law applied to entities that actually hold or control funds, with appropriate licensing, supervision, and technical standards. Penalties should be proportionately calibrated to violations of clearly articulated rules and paired with appropriate procedural protections.

Korea can protect merchants and strengthen trust in platform commerce. It does not need to do so by repurposing a platform fairness bill into a de facto payments regulation while attaching DMA-level penalties with fewer safeguards. That approach is not global best practice. It is an invitation to avoidable trade friction.