A Study on the Current Situation and the Improvement Plan of Communication Dispute Resolution through the ADR

With more and more broadcasting and communication service providers offering their combined services in domestic and overseas markets, this study aims to review and find potential improvements to the ADR(Alternative Dispute Resolution) system as a method independent from the court or any current system of justice involving small and large scale disputes between service providers and consumers. Domestically, there are systems and measures for resolving disputes between service providers and consumers such as contacting customer service centers, arbitration from civil organizations, filing civil complaints with the Korea Consumer Agency or its Consumer Dispute Arbitration Committee and consulting the Korea Communication Commission. Attempts towards resolution by organizations with different purposes, however, will inevitably lead to different results since communication and broadcasting services require professional knowledge and experience in dispute resolution, at least to some degree. The biggest problem is that, even though procedures towards resolutions are mostly similar or identical, the resolutions themselves tend to differ extremely. Therefore, this paper makes comparisons between the current status of the ADR system in Korea and that of the U.K., the details of which are following:First, an overview of the ADR system is offered, which applies to local broadcasting service dispute, then this paper takes a deeper look at the budget and mediation system of the Korean Communication Commission(KCC hereinafter). We then explain why our conclusion is that the current limits on KCC's budget and mediation system need to be lifted. Secondly, After a review of ADR in 2005, Ofcom recommended guidelines to improve the effectiveness of ADR in four aspects, that is ensuring complainants, providing transparency, assessing accessibility and consumer satisfaction and ensuring compliance. In addition, the Ofcom's review of its ADR schmme policy is presently in progress from 20. October this year. we present an overview of the ADR system applied by Ofcom in the U.K. along with mentioned lessons from U.K. cases, such as Otelo and CISAS, which may be benchmarked or introduced by the KCC for the Korean market. Thirdly, we provide a direct comparison between KCC's mediation system and ADR of Ofcom, and accordingly make suggestions for our local service dispute resolutions. and In this paper we emphasized the improving necessity of ADR scheme, especially in point of strengthen the strength and make up for the weakness of ADR scheme. we offer three improvement ways to apply the Ofocm' case to our nation without sacrificing the merit and advantage of ADR scheme as follow: (1) the features of confidence, equity, and efficiency, (2) the advantage of low-cost, and (3) the procedures easy used and speed. The first improvement plan is to set-up independent organizations for dispute resolution in the field of broadcasting and telecommunications, and the second plan is to treat the effect of ADR's result without discrimination, and the third plan is to release to the media, website, official report and etc. of the dispute resolution. Of course, three plans take care of countermeasure to prevent from the invasion of privacy or personal information. Lastly, as in the U.K's cases mentioned above, the ADR scheme looks forward to materially improvement that the dispute resolution makes, which the consumer, service provider and government gets satisfied also in korea, more sense, more quickly, and more less cost.