Why Is the U.S. Congress Defending a Korea-Based Shopping Platform That Profits in Korea While Leaking Customer Data?

 

Customers in Korea, Lobbyists in Washington: Coupang’s Unusual “Nationality” Strategy

If you’re looking for a simple explanation of Coupang in the United States, here it is: it’s not that Americans “don’t really use it.” For practical purposes, they can’t—at least not in the way Korean consumers can. Coupang doesn’t run a consumer-facing e-commerce operating base in the U.S. with the kind of local logistics, membership ecosystem, and everyday service footprint that would make it a real option for American shoppers. There’s no U.S. “Rocket Delivery” experience embedded into ordinary life, no platform habit, no mainstream consumer entry point.

And yet, in Washington, D.C., Coupang is very much alive.

That asymmetry—revenue in Korea, political energy in the U.S.—is not a minor quirk. It reads like the company’s worldview in miniature: earn in won, pay in dollars, and import leverage in the language of alliances.

A “U.S. Company,” Mainly on Paper

Structurally, Coupang often gets described as a U.S. company. Coupang Inc. owns 100% of the Korean entity, and the stock trades in the United States. At this point, “nationality” starts to look less like a cultural fact and more like a corporate document stamped by a listing venue and an ownership chart.

But wearing the outfit of a U.S.-listed company doesn’t just bring prestige. It brings a bill.

Public companies in the U.S. must explain risk to investors, and risk usually arrives with familiar faces: regulation, enforcement, politics, legal change. The more revenue Coupang stacks in Korea, the more Korea’s laws and policy shifts become not “local conditions” but formalized “risk factors.” Predictably, the company’s gaze drifts away from American consumers (who aren’t using the service anyway) and toward Korean bills, regulators, and parliamentary votes.

When Lobbying Isn’t About Entering a Market—It’s About Defending One

This is where the story flips.

Coupang’s Washington lobbying doesn’t look like the warm-up lap for U.S. consumer expansion. It looks like a full-scale defense strategy for its Korea-centered business. The goal is not to win American customers. The goal is to win a frame.

Specifically:

• Translate Korean regulatory debates into U.S. digital trade language.

• Repackage domestic policy disputes as non-tariff barriers or discrimination against U.S. firms.

• Elevate “a Korean law question” into “a bilateral issue” that can echo through negotiations.

Once that translation succeeds, Korean policy is no longer just Korean policy. It becomes an item that can be referenced, pressured, and leveraged in venues where the rules of the game change—trade talks, diplomatic channels, congressional narratives.

In other words, lobbying buys you something better than airtime. It buys you altitude.

Congress as an Amplifier: A Letter Becomes a Shadow

In this model, U.S. Congress is not just a political institution. It’s a loudspeaker.

A single congressional letter, a hearing, a formal expression of “concern”—these are tiny objects with disproportionate weight. They can cast long shadows over Korean regulators and domestic policy processes, because once the phrase “unfair treatment of U.S. companies” enters the record, it becomes usable.

And in politics, “usable” often outranks “accurate.”

The decisive question isn’t whether every claim is perfectly faithful to local nuance. It’s whether the claim can travel—through trade frameworks, alliance rhetoric, and negotiation pressure. For a company facing regulatory risk where it actually operates and earns, borrowing the grammar of U.S. power can be more efficient than persuading domestic public opinion.

Why the Focus Tilts Toward Foreign Policy, Trade, and Legal Channels

That’s also why observers tend to read Coupang’s lobbying posture as oriented less toward everyday consumer issues—delivery standards, customer protection, retail competition—and more toward foreign policy, trade, and legal-institutional lanes.

The moment a domestic regulation is reframed as a trade barrier, the nature of the dispute changes:

• “Policy” becomes “barrier.”

• “Public interest” becomes “market access.”

• “Domestic debate” becomes “bilateral friction.”

A platform regulation argument, once translated into digital trade terms, comes with a wider arsenal. It becomes less about compliance and more about leverage.

Public Diplomacy as a Polishing Cloth

Add the language of public diplomacy, and the surface gets even smoother.

Partnerships framed as contributing to public diplomacy initiatives can make a company look less like an interest group and more like a “policy partner.” Lobbying is no longer plain self-interest; it can be dressed in the wardrobe of shared values, cooperation, and alliance-friendly messaging.

Politics has many expensive commodities, but one stands out: the appearance of legitimacy.

And legitimacy is sometimes cheaper to acquire through official partnerships than through public trust.

The Real Question Isn’t “Why Lobby if Americans Don’t Use It?”

That question is too gentle.

A sharper version is:
Why does a company with no real U.S. consumer operating base work so hard to transact with U.S. political power?

The answer is not complicated. Coupang’s business is in Korea. Its regulatory risk is in Korea. And it may calculate that U.S. political and trade machinery can help reduce that risk—or at least reshape the battlefield.

Pay the premium in dollars. Protect the cash flow in won.

Nationality Is a Tool, Not a Place

If this still feels strange, it may be because we’re clinging to an older habit: thinking a company’s nationality is defined by where it sells and serves customers.

In the modern economy, nationality is increasingly assigned by listings and legal structures. And loyalty is often determined less by citizenship than by where the biggest regulatory risk lives.

Coupang, in that sense, looks like a company that doesn’t sell to America—but knows how to use America remarkably well.

Coupang, the “oops-our-data” tech firm: profits in Korea, lobbying in America.

 Viewed strictly in terms of its ownership structure and listing status, Coupang is classified as a U.S. company. Coupang Inc owns 100% of the Korean operating entity, and its shares are traded on a U.S. stock exchange. Criticism has also persisted that there are no Korean members on the board of directors. On its U.S. website, Coupang has described itself as a “U.S. technology company,” and reports have said that in August 2024 it signed an agreement with the U.S. Department of State to support the expansion of public diplomacy. At the time, the State Department said it would work with Coupang to establish American Spaces in South Korea, prompting interpretations that Coupang appeared to be aligning itself with the thrust of United States foreign policy.

Yet many assessments note that, despite the legal outward form of a “U.S. company,” Coupang has little felt presence in the U.S. market. A similarly sized e-commerce firm such as eBay is widely recognized among the U.S. public, whereas Coupang is said to be comparatively little known in the United States. One explanation is that services highlighted on Coupang’s U.S. website—such as Rocket Delivery and streaming—are not actually offered to U.S. consumers, and that this feeds into the recognition gap. Observations have followed that Coupang is often left out when rankings of U.S. e-commerce companies are discussed. Although there is talk that it could expand its role as a platform distributing U.S. products to consumers in Korea and Taiwan, the view remains that this share is still small in Coupang’s overall revenue.

Against that backdrop, a concern has been raised that Coupang’s active lobbying of U.S. political circles can seem puzzling. Lobbying is common in industries where profits fluctuate with regulation and government support, but the idea is that it is not intuitively easy to explain why a company that does not run its business around U.S. consumers would intensify influence operations in Washington. Even so, figures suggesting Coupang’s lobbying outlays are substantial have been repeatedly cited. Based on data compiled by OpenSecrets, Coupang spent about $8.58 million on lobbying from 2021 through the third quarter of 2025, and the total is summarized as roughly $10.75 million when direct political donations are included. For 2024 alone, spending was tallied at about $3.31 million, placing it 193rd out of roughly 9,200 entities subject to lobbying disclosure. Comparisons have been drawn to eBay’s lobbying spend (about $2.05 million) and to Hyundai Motor Company (about $2.32 million), which is often described as having strong demand for U.S. government lobbying due to EV subsidies and tariff issues—comparisons that reinforced the impression that Coupang was far from “passive.” In addition, reports said Coupang contributed $1 million to the fund preparing Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2025, and that Bom Kim attended the official inauguration ceremony held at the U.S. Capitol as a result.

Observations have continued that the focus of Coupang’s lobbying is less on domestic consumer issues and more on diplomacy, trade, and legal-institutional domains. There has also been an account that a contact in Washington, D.C. who reviewed Coupang’s lobbying reports said, in effect, that the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee appeared to be core targets. The personnel dimension has likewise emphasized connections along “foreign policy–national security–judiciary” lines. For example, a case has been cited in which Alex Wong, described as having overseen lobbying efforts at Coupang in 2021, was nominated as Deputy National Security Advisor in a second Trump term. Accounts have also described former U.S. government officials—such as figures associated with Marco Rubio’s orbit and former Judiciary Committee staffers—handling Coupang’s government relations. The institutions listed as lobbying counterparts have been described broadly as including both chambers of Congress and the White House, along with the National Security Council, the State Department, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, and the U.S. Department of Commerce.

This trajectory has been described as overlapping with U.S.-side objections surrounding South Korea’s proposed “Online Platform Act.” In June 2025, Politico was summarized as reporting that U.S. IT companies—including Coupang, Google, and Apple—had continued to criticize South Korea’s platform regulation as discriminatory against U.S. firms, and that Jamieson Greer and Howard Lutnick had, during tariff negotiations, reflected company views and privately pressed for halting the bill’s advance. Even if it cannot be pinned down as Coupang’s effort alone, an assessment has followed that it is still notable that a company earning most of its revenue in Korea came to reinforce the U.S. side’s logic during a Korea–U.S. trade negotiation phase. In that context, it has been pointed out that Coupang participates in the Computer & Communications Industry Association, which opposes platform regulation across jurisdictions such as the European Union and South Korea, and that it also joined the board of the National Foreign Trade Council, whose members include Walmart and Ford. The same line of reporting has said that Coupang, which had contracted with a lobbying firm connected to Joe Biden’s administration, later partnered—after Trump’s reelection—with two firms associated with conservative figures such as Rubio and Mike Pence.

Political donations and cultural-institution contributions have also been mentioned together. One account states that Coupang’s corporate PAC donated $100,000 to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, described as a major venue in Washington, D.C. Another figure presented is that it donated about $198,978 to lawmakers and campaign organizations across both the Republican and Democratic parties. Within that total, it was said that Jason Smith received $15,000, and that he serves as chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, which handles trade matters.

The suspicion that Coupang may be seeking to influence Korean policy decisions through the U.S. government has been described as being reinforced not only by the scale of lobbying but also by the direction of its “risk perception.” A representative point is the claim that Coupang’s annual report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission enumerated changes in Korean laws and institutions at length as risk factors. The risks listed were summarized as wide-ranging: possible adoption of platform regulation, application of the Serious Accidents Punishment Act, the Fair Trade Act, union activity, litigation, and criminal penalties and fines. 

The assessment added that, rather than emphasizing a willingness to comply, the filing notably elaborated on instability stemming from legal change and punishment, and that it appeared to treat domestic regulatory change in Korea as a larger uncertainty than issues like information security or shifts in the international economy. In that context, accounts have also cited an instance in July 2024 in which the House Judiciary Committee sent a formal protest letter to the Korea Fair Trade Commission over the Online Platform Act initiative, as well as an instance in December 2024 in which the USTR canceled an annual Korea–U.S. FTA meeting amid interpretations about what lay behind the decision. A further example cited in the same vein is that, on January 12, 2026, Darrell Issa publicly disclosed a meeting with Yeo Han-gu and invoked a frame of “unfair treatment” related to Coupang.

Taken together, the argument surrounding Coupang has often been summarized as follows: “Its legal identity is that of a U.S. company, but the substantive base of its business lies in Korea, and it therefore treats Korea’s regulatory and political environment as a risk while concentrating its efforts on Washington’s foreign policy, trade, and legal channels.” From this perspective, the Korean government, National Assembly, and public opinion are framed as “risks” for Coupang, and the conclusion naturally follows that Coupang’s interests and the policy direction sought within Korean society are oriented in different directions.