App Stores Become the New Gatekeepers: Google Delists Exchanges, Revealing the Shift in Regulatory Power

【Crypto World】Google officially announced that starting from January 28, it will remove a certain leading exchange and a mainstream exchange from the Korean Google Play Store. Officially, it’s because these two platforms did not pass local registration and anti-money laundering checks. But the underlying issues are even more worth pondering—app store operators are quietly becoming de facto regulators.

In the past, laws dictated everything directly. Now? An American tech company can decide which crypto services are accessible to millions of users in Korea simply by controlling distribution channels. This is not a legal ruling, but platform power. Here’s a rather ironic paradox: Korea, as an independent sovereign nation, should set and enforce its own rules, but instead, it’s being treated as a gatekeeper by an American tech platform. This not only changes the way regulation is implemented but also subtly reshapes the global crypto market’s power structure.