Seoul sends the U.S. House a point-by-point rebuttal on Coupang

The Korean government has sent the U.S. House Judiciary Committee a point-by-point rebuttal of a congressional report that accused Korea of discriminating against Coupang and other U.S. companies, the Foreign Ministry said Friday.

The Korean Embassy in Washington delivered the document to the committee on Thursday, the ministry said.

The rebuttal sets out Korea's principles for writing and enforcing regulations, argues that the country's digital rules do not discriminate by nationality and lays out the government's account of the Coupang data leak, the reasoning behind the Personal Information Protection Commission's (PIPC) penalty and the legal basis for the measures taken against the company.

"The government expressed deep regret that the report was written on the basis of unverified claims," the ministry said. "It asked that the parts differing from fact be corrected and that important facts left out be added to the report."

The document was addressed to Rep. Jim Jordan, who chairs the Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Scott Fitzgerald, who chairs its Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform and Antitrust. It runs to roughly the same length as the committee's report.

The committee released that 35-page interim staff report on July 1 in Washington under the title "Closed for Competition: South Korea's Discriminatory Attacks on American-owned Businesses." Holding up Coupang, which is incorporated in Delaware, as its leading example, the report accused the Korean government of running a "harassment campaign" against the company and argued that Seoul had escalated a former employee's unauthorized access to customer data into a governmentwide campaign against the Seattle-based company, Korea's largest e-commerce platform.

Coupang disclosed the breach in November and later put the number of affected accounts at 33.7 million. The PIPC fined the company a record 624.6 billion won ($423 million) in June.

The report drew criticism in Seoul for reproducing Coupang's own account with little scrutiny.

The government had objected once already, the day after the report appeared.

"The government has explained our position fully in its contacts with the Judiciary Committee," the Foreign Ministry said on July 2. "We express regret that the committee's report unilaterally reflects only Coupang's claims."

The National Intelligence Service, Korea's spy service, separately called the report's allegation that it directed the recovery of Coupang IT equipment "plainly false."

The submission of a formal rebuttal suggests Seoul is worried that the dispute is spilling into security policy. Talks on implementing the security commitments the two presidents agreed at their summit formally opened in June and have since fallen behind, with the Coupang dispute widely blamed in diplomatic circles.

"The government will manage this so that the Coupang situation does not weigh on Korea-U.S. relations," a Foreign Ministry official said. "At the same time, we will stay in contact with the Judiciary Committee and others across the U.S. government and policy community, and respond actively to the distortion of facts by the Coupang side."

BY SHIM SEOK-YONG [[email protected]]