Hello, welcome back to Emlex's podcast covering the top stories in regulatory affairs with the assistance of our team of reporters around the globe.

My name is James Panicki, MlexMex Asia Senior Editor, and I'm coming

to you today from the LexisNexis offices in Melbourne, Australia. It's great to have your company.

Now, as our readers know only too well, South Korea has been at the forefront of digital

platform regulation for many years now, And the country's antitrust

watchdog, the Korea Fair Trade Commission, or KFTC, has been central to this equation,

with its often muscular enforcement of local competition laws. But for the past year,

South Korea has been trying something new and arguably less combative.

Self-regulation has been put forward as an alternative to platform-specific legislation.

That is, the requirement that the powerful platforms, both international and home-grown,

create their own rules and standards.

But is it working?

And does this mean that the KFTC has taken its foot

off the enforcement pedal? Well, Mlex's South Korea reporters spent some time with Hankegee John,

who has been the country's antitrust chief since last September, and they put some of those

questions to him. It was a wide-ranging conversation which also took

in the issue of unfair trade practices in the creative content industry and the KFTC's relationship

with the country's prosecutors. There's even something in it for fans of K-pop and it has all

come together very nicely indeed in a special report which is ready for you to download right now.

The two M-X reporters who wrote that special report are Wuyong Li and Jenny Lee,

who I am pleased to say are with us now from our offices in Seoul.

Jenny, starting with you, if I may, on the issue of digital platforms.

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