Alternative to ActiveX
Minister of Science, ICT and Future Planning Choi Moon-ki mentioned the digital certificate issue at a press conference held on March 24 to celebrate the first anniversary of the ministry. “We will prepare an environment in which an accredited certificate can be used without ActiveX until the development of an HTML5-based framework is completed within this year,” he said.
His remark shows how much the government is concerned over digital certificates, which have recently been mentioned by President Park Geun-hye as the first deregulation target. She has stressed that the certificate should be eliminated to deal with the online trade deficit and the slow progress of the penetration of global e-commerce. These problems cannot be rooted out by just removing the certificate, though.
Accredited certificates will remain essential unless the Internet environment of Korea, in which most services are available only after identification, is changed from the ground up. If only the certificates are removed, more confusion is likely, with the intended result still far away.
“The accredited certificates are a sort of electronic seal and we are still in need of it,” the minister explained, continuing, “Otherwise, problems would arise in online banking and e-commerce, because it is the most secure platform as of now.”
Experts point out that the controversies surrounding ActiveX and Web standards are also auxiliary to the deep-rooted identification tradition in the local Internet environment. “Online identification procedures have to be overhauled from the very beginning,” said one official.