"New" Cultural Diversity Policy in the Digital World: Net-neutrality regulation on bottleneck players (Japanese)

As cultural products become digitized and distributed in the Internet protocol (IP) broadband network, traditional cultural diversity regulations and their theoretical basis are being inevitably affected. In an emerging digital world, cultural products are produced, distributed, and consumed through the IP broadband network; an unlimited volume and variety of contents—cultural products as data—are proliferated with low cost; and users are empowered to "pull" together all of their selected contents and become active creators. In this environment, one of the most important regulatory interventions for cultural diversity should be competition policy measures to protect users' free and fair access to the broadband network and contents. bWhile the net-neutrality principle could be a guiding principle in ensuring access rights of users by controlling the dominant players in the IP broadband network, any net-neutrality rule on platform players in the contents/application layers such as Google always has the risk of an over-inclusive regulation. Applying competition law on Google Search also requires careful analysis in determining market power and anticompetitive effect.