Anybody who follows Planet Mozilla should have ran into this article once or twice. For the third time encryption in South Korea, and how it makes IE the only choice for banking (not Firefox, Opera, Safari) leading to the removal of competition not only in browsers, but also in operating systems, as IE cannot be ran on Linux, and fails spectacularly on Macs.
I do believe that having something about this as an article on Mises.org will give a strong example of how regulations cause distortions in the market.
There are a number of both technical and policy-based reasons why things are the way they are. First, the Koreans have conflated encryption and identification- their current system also provides identity information delivered with the requirement of their Korean National ID. (The equivalent would be if an Amazon.com user in the US was required to have and provide a US Social Security Number or US Passport number in order to make a simple purchase online.) Then there is the fact that every website is coded for IE and requires the use of IE and ActiveX, so it’s no trivial matter to change every website for a new process.
The Korean government needs to re-think their entire online policy and move away from plugins completely and support a cross-platform, cross-browser solution as we have everywhere in the rest of the world.