Open Net (오픈넷)

Open Net is the Seoul-headquartered Korean civil-society digital-rights organisation founded on 4 February 2013 and approved by the Seoul Radiowave Management Office on 7 March 2013 by a cohort of legal scholars, lawyers, and technologists who had just won the August 2012 Constitutional Court complaint against South Korea's internet real-name law and decided to consolidate that win into a standing organisation. It is the country's principal civil-society anchor on freedom of expression online, net neutrality, surveillance and privacy, intermediary liability, intellectual-property reform, open government, and — since 2023 — AI policy and the algorithmic-rights register that the Korean state has begun building under its 2024 Basic Act on the Development of Artificial Intelligence.

Founding and structure

Open Net was founded by Kim Keechang, Park Kyung-sin, Nam Heesob, Jeon Eung-hui, Woo Jisuk, Kang Jung Soo, and Kim Borami in the immediate aftermath of the August 2012 Constitutional Court ruling that struck down the general internet real-name law — a regulation that had since 2007 required resident-registration-number identity verification for any user posting on Korean sites above a daily-visitor threshold. The activists, lawyers, and academics who had organised the complaint converged on Open Net as the institutional vehicle for the rest of the agenda the real-name fight had surfaced: net neutrality, intermediary liability, surveillance powers, copyright takedown abuse, and the broader question of why those regulations existed in the first place. The APC interview marking the organisation's tenth anniversary on 8 March 2024 anchors that origin story explicitly: Open Net "emerged in 2014 following civil society's successful Constitutional Complaint against South Korea's internet real-name law", consolidating activists "who fought this regulation … to establish the organization dedicated to creating an open internet environment".

The organisation is governed by a board chaired by Jeongsoo Kang (Concurrent Professor at Yonsei University's School of Business and Director of the Digital Society Research Institute), with Kilnam Chun (Professor Emeritus at KAIST and Vice-President at Keio University, often credited as the engineer who connected Korea to the early internet in 1982) as Senior Advisor, and Park Kyung-sin (Professor at Korea University Law School) as Executive Director. The current directors include Seunghee You (Chairman of the Institute for an Inclusive Society), Nari Yun (lawyer and former judicial officer), and Sanku Jo (CEO of WeHome and President of the Sharing Economy Association of Korea). Park Kyung-sin — widely referenced as K.S. Park — is the organisation's principal public-facing legal advocate and a named co-author of the Necessary and Proportionate Principles on Communications Surveillance and the Manila Principles on Intermediary Liability, as recorded in Columbia's Global Freedom of Expression expert profile of Park.

Programme structure

Open Net organises its work across six declared programme banners — Freedom of Speech, Intellectual Property, Privacy, Network Neutrality, Open Government, and Innovation and Regulations — and parallel cross-cutting work on surveillance, internet governance, and digital-security capacity-building. The OONI partner profile of the organisation records the same six-area set in slightly different vocabulary (freedom of expression, freedom from surveillance, removing innovation-blocking regulations, net governance and neutrality, open data policy, and intellectual-property reform) and captures the dual-mode positioning that runs through Open Net's self-description: it aspires to be "a legal and legislative advocacy organization that fights regulations" as well as "a think tank that inquires into the reasons for these regulations".

Each programme line runs simultaneously as litigation, legislative advocacy, public-comment submission, and explanatory writing. The Freedom of Speech and Intellectual Property lines have produced the longest-running litigation record; the Privacy line drives the surveillance and communications-interception work; the Net Neutrality line carries the platform-zero-rating and network-usage-fee work; and the Innovation and Regulations line is where the AI register sits.

Internet real-name law and the founding litigation arc

Open Net's institutional identity is anchored on the abolition of South Korea's internet real-name law. The general law had been struck down by the Constitutional Court in August 2012 — the case that produced the founding cohort — and Open Net then pursued the residual real-name regulations that survived the 2012 decision. The organisation welcomed the subsequent Constitutional Court decision nullifying the internet real-name system for the election-campaign period as one in a line of cumulative wins against identity-verification mandates on online speech, and the abolition of the real-name regime remains the most-cited reference point in the organisation's own self-presentation and in independent retrospectives of post-2010 Korean digital-rights advocacy.

The wider litigation arc has produced a recurring series of constitutional and administrative-law challenges to Korean executive content regulation. Open Net's July 2013 constitutional complaint against government-mandated identity verification for minors and its January 2014 suit against the Korea Communications Standards Commission's blocking of Grooveshark sit early in that sequence. Open Net has annotated and contested the Korea Communications Standards Commission's administrative censorship powers for the entire life of the organisation, and the recent Supreme Court of Korea ruling overturning National Election Commission censorship orders is one in the ongoing line of Open Net administrative-censorship wins.

Net neutrality and platform-economy advocacy

Open Net frames its net-neutrality work as the line on which the organisation has had its most consequential victories. The 2013 restoration of Kakao Voice Talk after KT and SKT had restricted access to the VoIP service, and the 2022 defeat of the network usage fee bill through a 286,000-signature petition (a scale the APC interview describes as "exceptionally significant in South Korea's context"), together constitute the organisation's signature platform-economy advocacy register. The network usage fee bill — which would have required content providers to pay Korean telecommunications operators for the traffic those operators carry to subscribers — was widely understood as a structural threat to the open-internet principle that providers and users connect to one another without intermediary tolling, and Open Net's organising of the public response is the most-cited civil-society defeat of the bill.

Intermediary liability and the Manila Principles

Open Net is the principal Korean civil-society anchor on intermediary-liability reform. The organisation hosted the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Manila Principles tour in Seoul, inviting EFF to brief Korean lawmakers, intermediaries, and users on the gap between Korean takedown-on-notice law and the international standards set out in the Manila Principles. The Manila Principles project page on the tour records the joint campaign and Open Net's amendment programme on the Copyright Act and the Information Communication Network Act, advancing the structural critique that Korean law unlawfully holds intermediaries liable for failing to restrict lawful content, requires content restriction without judicial assessment of illegality, and imposes a general monitoring obligation incompatible with international intermediary-liability standards. Open Net's General Counsel Kelly Kim presented Korea's intermediary-liability landscape against the Manila Principles framework at the 2015 global Internet Governance Forum, anchoring the Korean intermediary-liability conversation inside the wider international standard-setting body of work that Open Net's Executive Director Park Kyung-sin had helped author.

AI, the AI Basic Act, and the deepfake constitutional complaint

Open Net's AI-and-algorithmic-rights register has consolidated in 2024–2025 around three simultaneous threads: a critique of the Korean Basic Act on the Development of Artificial Intelligence, a constitutional complaint against an AI-specific election-law prohibition, and a re-framing of data-governance debates as the substantive arena in which AI-rights policy is actually decided.

On the AI Basic Act itself — passed by the National Assembly in December 2024 and entered into force on 22 January 2026 — Open Net's Global Free Speech Summit Nashville presentation by K.S. Park (October 2025) sets out the organisation's principal critique: the law "makes the government's role prominent in vetting high impact AI, which opens up a possibility for government censorship". Park's eight-point critique attacks the structural premise of broad AI-application regulation — "these existing laws burden this first amendment activity just because it is carried out with a particular type of software" — and proposes a three-prong reformist alternative anchored on improving training-data availability, enhancing data-privacy governance, and improving data quality to prevent amplification of "bias, hate, and falsity".

On the deepfake prohibition, Open Net filed a constitutional complaint on 1 October 2025 challenging Article 82-8(1) of the Public Official Election Act, which prohibits "production, editing, distribution, screening, or posting of virtual sounds, images, or videos … created using artificial intelligence technology" for election campaigning during the 90-day pre-election period, with criminal penalties of up to seven years' imprisonment or fines of 10–50 million won. Open Net characterises the provision as a "knee-jerk reaction to unfounded fear" — the law prohibits the use of the technology regardless of consent, truth, or labelling, and therefore "can regulate even expressions intended to embody and convey truthful facts, as well as satire and parodies". The filing is one of the corpus's clearest civil-society constitutional challenges to a generative-AI-specific speech restriction.

On data governance, Open Net's Open Government Partnership Summit 2025 session on data governance for open data frames the underlying AI policy debate as one about whether to treat data on the property-rights model or the commons model. Park's argument against the "I own my data" frame ("it is obvious you cannot own and control data about yourselves"), and his alternative AI-training rights model based on unwaivable artists' rights to remuneration rather than restriction of training-data access, sit inside the same global civil-society conversation on AI training data, generative-AI copyright, and the structural choice between training-data prohibition and training-data licensing that the Authors Guild and the Concept Art Association have been conducting from the litigation side in the United States.

Coalition role and regional convening

Open Net is an APC member organisation, placing it inside the Association for Progressive Communications network alongside the Foundation for Media Alternatives, EngageMedia, and SAFEnet as the East-Asian counterpart to the Southeast-Asian APC anchor set. The organisation joined the Global Network Initiative in 2023, placing it inside the principal multistakeholder coalition convening tech companies, civil-society organisations, academics, and investors on freedom-of-expression and privacy standards. Open Net partners with the Open Observatory of Network Interference on technical censorship measurement in Korea, and the APC anniversary interview records the organisation's strategic priorities as strengthening Southeast-Asian collaboration through the APC network and building direct communication channels with platform companies to counter government pressure on civil-society organisations.

Funding

Open Net's funding base is mixed individual-donor, foundation, and corporate-platform support, with no single dominant funder reported in the organisation's public-facing materials. The most-cited published funding figure is the Korea Times November 2022 report — based on National Tax Service data — that Google Korea donated 220 million won to Open Net in 2020, a figure surfaced in the context of a lawmaker's allegation that Open Net's net-neutrality and platform-policy advocacy aligned with Google's commercial interest in the network-usage-fee debate. Open Net's response framed the donations within the organisation's broader donor base and pointed to its long-standing public positioning against the network-usage-fee bill as predating the Google funding. The corpus does not yet hold a Funder entry for Google or its philanthropic arm; Open Net's mixed-funding posture is recorded here as a documented organisational fact rather than as a frontmatter funders[] entry.

Posture in the movement

Open Net's distinctive contribution to the make-AI-good movement is its work as the principal Korean civil-society anchor on freedom of expression, net neutrality, surveillance and privacy, intermediary liability, and — increasingly — AI-and-algorithmic-rights policy on a state that has now adopted the world's first integrated national AI statute. Its 2025 constitutional complaint against Article 82-8(1) of the Public Official Election Act is one of the corpus's clearest civil-society constitutional challenges to a generative-AI-specific election-law prohibition; its critique of the Korean AI Basic Act as a structural opening to government censorship of "high-impact AI" is one of the corpus's clearest civil-society documentations of the trade-off between state AI safety vetting and freedom of expression; and its long record of net-neutrality, real-name-law, and intermediary-liability litigation is the most sustained Korean civil-society advocacy record on internet freedoms. In the corpus's terms Open Net is the load-bearing Korean and East-Asian digital-rights organisational anchor — the East-Asian counterpart to SAFEnet and the Foundation for Media Alternatives in Southeast Asia and to the Internet Freedom Foundation in South Asia, and the first Korea-headquartered entity entry in the corpus.