By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter
Government attempts to impose rules on Internet users appear to be failing. Just over a year after requiring verifiable, real-name registrations on most Korean Web sites, message boards and chat rooms, the Korea Communications Commission (KCC) now admits that the decision may have been a mistake.
In meeting with the chief executives of Internet companies last week, KCC Chairman, Choi See-jooong said that the agency would ``reconsider'' the real-name requirements, which local companies report are detering their ability to compete with global services such as Google.
Choi's comments come at a time when the resistance to online identity verification has been growing. Pandora TV, one of the country's leading Internet video sites, issued complaints to the KCC and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, Tuesday, claiming that the real-name requirements are resulting in a competitive disadvantage for Korean Internet companies.
Pandora TV joins a chorus led by NHN, the owner of top search engine, Naver (www.naver.com), and other local firms like Daum (www.daum.net) and SK Communications, which runs Nate (www.nate.com) and the Cyworld (www.cyworld.com) social networking service, who have been vocal in their rejection of the online verification rules.
Obviously, Pandora TV can't be too happy about Google's YouTube (www.youtube.com) cementing its status as the country's top Web destination for videos. Pandora TV actually led YouTube in page views before July last year, but hasn't been able to recover its lead since.
``The real-name requirements make it complicated for Korean Internet users to post videos or leave comments on Pandora TV. However, everything is much easier with YouTube, which is run by a foreign company operating on a foreign server,'' said a Pandora TV official.
Since last year, Korean Internet users have been required to submit their resident registration codes, the Korean equivalent of social security numbers, before posting files or comments on Web sites with more than 100,000 daily visitors. Although critics raised concerns that the rules may suppress legitimate online speech, government officials insisted that limiting anonymity would be inevitable to curb cyber-bullying and libelous claims on the Internet.
However, the resistance by the Korean Internet companies has been fierce, and it seems that these Internet rules could be rendered irrelevant as the Web goes mobile.
Since April last year, Google has been blocking users from uploading videos and posting comments on YouTube's Korean sites to avoid the requirements for real-name registrations, refusing to bend its privacy principles only for Korea. The company's decision to ban video uploads didn't cause much disturbance for Korean YouTube users as they could easily post their files by choosing a different country preference.
Expecting that the rules would be consistent in the mobile Internet realm, Google banned YouTube uploads from the Motorola Motori, a smartphone powered by the Google-backed Android operating system, when local wireless carrier SK Telecom released the handset earlier this year.
However, this touched off a debate, as the users of iPhone, released by KT, had been enjoying full freedom to upload videos onto YouTube through their handsets, without going through the trouble of real-name verification.
Google was taken aback last month when the KCC decided that it would be legally difficult to restrict YouTube uploads from mobile devices, since YouTube no longer operates a separate Korean site.
``It's not that we will be looking to eliminate the identity verification system totally. But we will set up a task-force team to communicate with the Internet companies and consider ways to tweak the current rules so that certain companies don't feel disadvantaged,'' said an official from KCC's policy bureau.
The awkwardness of extending desktop rules to mobile devices is even more evident when it comes to games. A local law that requires all game content to be approved by the state before being made commercially available is proving to be a major setback for gaming companies.
This has prevented Apple from providing games to Korean iPhone and iPod Touch users through App Store and also forced Google to shut down the games category in its Android Market, the content platform for smartphones based on the Android operating system.