Platform Algorithmic Power and Regulatory Lag: Toward a Co-regulatory Model for Digital Commerce Platforms

초록

This study examines the legal and policy implications of algorithmic power and regulatory lag on digital commerce platforms and proposes an institutional design for a Korean co-regulatory model. Digital platforms shape consumer choice, seller visibility, and market access through search ranking, recommendation systems, transaction matching, dispatch allocation, and review exposure, yet the prevailing ex post competition-law framework may leave a substantial interval between the initiation of challenged conduct and the competition authority's first public sanction. Employing comparative case analysis of publicly available Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) decisions, court judgments, and legislative materials, the article examines three cases Naver Shopping/Video, Kakao Mobility, and Coupang private-brand products and operationalizes regulatory lag as: Regulatory Lag = Tsanction-Tconduct start This metric does not denote judicial finality; rather, it identifies a temporal structure under which competitive foreclosure, consumer-choice distortion, and market entrenchment may become difficult to reverse, without establishing a causal effect of delay. In response, the article proposes a proportionate co-regulatory framework centered on targeted interim measures, limited evidentiary burden-shifting that preserves the authority's ultimate burden of persuasion, algorithmic compliance officers, independent audit and data-access powers, and meaningful explanation and objection procedures, organized through a three-stage trigger roadmap that differentiates obligations according to platform influence and risk.

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