The number of sexually explicit and violent Web sites is decreasing for the first time, according to KT, the country’s biggest telecommunications company. / Korea Times File |
By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter
The number of Korean Web sites containing pornography, violence and gambling fell for the first time in 2005, industry figures have revealed.
However, South Korea still remains the world's third-largest source of objectionable online material, which calls for the need of more effective regulatory measures.
According to data compiled by KT's ``Clean-I '' Web filtering service, there were about 380,000 ``harmful'' Korean sites operating in May, about 7 percent less than the 410,000 at the end of last year. The number of such sites had increased every year since Clean-I first started counting in 2005, KT officials said.
There are about 3.45 million sites worldwide that contain sex, violence, gambling and other offensive material, 230,000 more than at the end of last year, with 1,500 to 2,000 new sites generated every day, KT said.
English sites accounted for about 1.99 million of the disturbing online destinations, or 57.6 percent, followed by the 490,000 Chinese sites, which accounted for 14.3 percent.
Korean sites, which accounted for 11 percent, came in third, relieved of its second-place position of last year, followed by the 360,000 German sites and the 80,000 Japanese sites.
More than 98 percent of those identified contained sexually explicit content, KT officials said, while gambling sites accounted for 1.62 percent and violent and ``grotesque'' sites combined for 0.05 percent.
``Although the decrease in the total number of sites is encouraging, this doesn't exactly mean that the users of these sites have declined by the same rate as well,'' said a KT spokesman.
``Sexually explicit material and gambling programs could especially have a harmful influence on under-aged Internet users, so there is a need for better monitoring.''
KT has about 450,000 customers for its Clean-I service, which monitors and filters Web access to unsafe Web sites by screening image, text and page layout.
The number of red-flagged Korean sites was at 220,000 in 2005, 230,000 in 2006, 240,000 in 2007 and 410,000 in 2008. The number of harmful sites worldwide exceeded 3 million for the first time last year, according to KT's data, compared to 1.41 million in 2005, 2.07 million in 2006 and 2.49 million in 2007.
Regulators and law enforcement authorities have been struggling to limit Internet users' exposure to inappropriate Web material, which often leads to social problems. And the changes in the number of Web sites fall short of telling the whole story.
Earlier this month, the National Police Agency said it found more than 8,300 posts on the message boards of major Web portals where the writers encouraged suicide and discussed methods.
And 96 people were arrested in Gwangju last week on charges of selling narcotics, including the date rape drug GHB through major Web sites such as Naver (www.naver.com) and Daum (www.daum.net). According to numbers from the Korea Food and Drug Administration, law enforcement authorities handled 338 cases regarding sales of illegal drugs on the Internet in the first half of last year, and it is believed the numbers are growing.
Local software maker Jiran said in a recent report that the number of sexually explicit video files taken from cameras on mobile phones, many of them containing images of teenagers, are becoming an increasing problem on Korean Web sites.
thkim@koreatimes.co.kr
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