By Kim Yoo-chul
Staff Reporter
The government plans to ban local Internet portals from editing headlines of news stories supplied by news organizations without permission.
``We have suggested the proposal to the presidential transition committee,’’ an official from the Ministry of Information and Communication said Monday.
``Moreover, Internet portals will have to pay compensation if they run stories that breach copyright,’’ he said, adding that the transition committee is considering revising related laws to uproot manipulation practices by portals.
Local online portals such as Naver and Daum have been dominating the home market with advanced search engines and specifically localized services.
The plan comes amid increasing worries over the misuse of online power to retain leadership in the industry.
In South Korea, where 33 million out of the total population of 48 million have access to high-speed broadband Internet, a flurry of problematic postings, especially related to rights infringements on the web, have been a chronic issue.
To beef up the legal mechanism aimed at combating the worsening infringement problem in cyberspace, the National Assembly passed a law last year, requiring users to put in their resident registration numbers when logging on to portal sites that have more than 300,000 hits on a daily basis.
``Talks are underway to introduce a package of measures to prohibit portals from changing news stories according to their interests,’’ the official said.