Gov't to protect restaurant owners from malicious reviews
Korea Communications Commission Chairman Han Sang-hyuk speaks during an interview with Hankook Ilbo, a sister paper of The Korea Times, in this 2019 file photo. Korea Times photo by Lee Han-ho
By Kim Jae-heun
With an increasing number of people ordering meals through food delivery services and searching for restaurants via online platforms, reviews have become an important valuation basis for future customers to refer to.
However, there also have been people taking advantage of this to bully individual businesses on the platform, especially restaurant owners, by demanding refunds for various absurd reasons.
Until recently, there had been no countermeasures to cope with this problem, and one restaurant owner even died of a brain hemorrhage after responding to a vicious customer five times in May. The customer kept requesting a refund for fried shrimp that was allegedly discolored a day after ordering the food and eventually left a scathing review and gave the restaurant one star out of five.
This incident triggered the Korea Communications Commission (KCC) to come up with a protection system consisting of five policies on Monday.
“In many parts of our lives we are now depending on online platform services and related damage reports are also increasing. The KCC will do its best to immediately utilize all the possible measures within the current legislation to protect and help platform users,” KCC Chairman Han Sang-hyuk said.
“We hope the proper function of the review system will be strengthened and its side effects are minimized by providing comprehensive measures that can be implemented right away and a policy for long-term protections.”
The very first plan is to provide guidelines to improve the customer review systems on online platforms.
The top telecom regulator will revise the information network law to protect individual businesses suffering economic damage from distortions or exaggerations in online reviews.
The new bill will hide those malicious comments and evaluations if they are proven to hurt the restaurant owners deliberately. Specific details on further actions will be provided with opinions gathered from interested parties.
The KCC will also monitor whether platform operators are protecting small traders and restaurant owners doing business on the channels. Then, the government agency will reflect its evaluation on the value-added common carriers such as Coupang and Naver Shopping and give scores based on their performance.
A consultation center will be set up within the KCC to give advice in the fields of administration, jurisdiction and the private sector to help individual businesses. The top telecom regulator promised it will take action directly with any reported cases occurring online.
The KCC will make an artificial-intelligence-based consultant bot to identify repeat offenses and will provide a handbook to platform users show how to cope with arising problems.