Does Jurisdiction Matter Online?

Abstract

Online information systems can in principle connect organizations and information across administrative boundaries. This paper examines whether that technical possibility altered the jurisdictional structure of government in a 2016 case involving two Korean nanotechnology information portals, NanoNet and NanoIn. The portals operated within different ministerial and organizational chains: one centered on science and technology policy and the other on industrial and commercialization policy. Although their functions increasingly overlapped and national plans repeatedly called for linkage and integration, the observed online connections largely followed the same offline jurisdictional lines. Each portal remained embedded in its own ministerial and affiliated-organizational domain, and direct portal-to-portal connection was weak and asymmetric. Hyperlinks are used here only as an operational indicator of the existence and direction of online organizational connection, not as the substantive object of the study. The substantive finding is simpler: the online structure did not transcend offline jurisdiction; it reproduced it. Later policy evidence confirms that nanotechnology informatization continued to be organized through jurisdictionally segmented information networks and that efforts to bridge them encountered inter-ministerial difficulties. The case suggests that digitalization can reproduce, and potentially reinforce, vertical administrative boxes when separate jurisdictions build and maintain parallel information infrastructures. Attached is Figure 1. Nanonet and Nonoin Hyperlinks, which is a figure in the 2016 manuscript but not here. It would be helpful to read through this paper concering the hyperlinkings between the two portals and related institutional websites.