This is a portal homepage that was forced to block a post criticizing Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon for his decision to limit rallies in front of City Hall. The city took advantage of a regulation requiring Web sites to suspend the posting of articles for a minimum of 30 days if they are deemed misleading or defamatory. / Korea Times |
By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter
After grumbling about the government attempts to impose rules for Internet users, the country's Internet companies are finally showing a collective backbone.
The Korea Internet Self-Governance Organization (KISO), an industry lobby of seven major Internet companies including NHN, Daum, SK Communications and Yahoo! Korea, said it looks to limit the say of government officials in its filtering process for content published on the Web sites of member companies.
``It is already established in theory that it is held against government institutions and local governments to protect basic rights (of people) as their duty. But they are not defined as the claimer of such rights,'' said a KISO official.
``The past court rulings have also established that public services carried out by public figures could not be subject to libel suits, unless it is firmly established that the reports were based on falsified facts. We have no intention of blocking Internet users from producing healthy criticism on the government.''
The Lee Myung-bak government has been considering new ways to monitor the Internet, introducing measures that include limiting online anonymity and enforcing better Web behaviors. Although critics say the moves threaten to suppress legitimate online speech, policymakers claim that the new rules are inevitable to curb cyber bullying.
One of the most controversial measures was granting authorities the power to suspend the publication of online articles for a minimum of 30 days if they are deemed as fraudulent or slanderous.
During this period, the Korean Communications Standards Commission, the arbitration body, decides whether the temporarily deleted content should be reinstated or removed permanently.
Critics insist that the side effects of the new rule are already manifesting through the ever-growing list of deleted articles and blog postings.
Anti-government rants and other thorny political commentary account for a larger part of the articles that were suspended by authorities in the previous months, according to a recent report by Jinbo Net (www.jinbo.net), an Internet-based civil liberties advocate.
Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon had Daum (www.daum.net) remove a post from a blogger criticizing the city's decision to ban rallies in front of the City Hall, while the National Police Agency had the online articles and photos about the violence during the police suppression of anti-government protests last year suspended.
A number of companies have also been using the law to suppress consumer complaints about their products and services, and even block stories about labor-management disputes.
KISO said it's member Web sites will no longer take requests from government organizations to delete comments on message boards. Government employees could still ask the Web sites to suspend articles they claim as misleading or defamatory, but will have to prove that the content was based on false facts.
Although refusing to be swung to hard by government organizations, KISO also said its Web sites will deploy stronger self-regulatory measures to keep online content ``clean" and protect users from potential litigation.
The Web sites said they will suspend the publishing of online content they find as libelous with or without the compliant of related persons. So far, they had suspended the articles when receiving complaints from the victim, who had to explain his problem with the article and submit uniform resource locator (URL) address.
However, some had pointed out that the law fails to effectively protect individuals from damaged reputations, when the content often travels quickly through the Internet.
thkim@koreatimes.co.kr
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