By Kim Yoo-chul
It was five months ago when Park, a 33-year-old worker in Seoul, got his first smartphone, the digital Swiss army knife that supports Web browsing, video, games and music atop of voice calls.
Too bad Park’s expensive device has been underutilized as a portable TV for pornography.
``I think therapists would evaluate me as a porn addict,’’ said Park, who understandably refused to have his full-named revealed.
``It’s hard for me to go to sleep without watching some sex videos on my phones at night. My wife has no ideas about my `porn escapades’ and things have gotten really uneasy.’’
Although pornography on the Web is nothing new, the lack of control on sexual content on the Internet is becoming a bigger problem as the Internet moves toward mobile devices like smartphones and touch-screen tablets.
Although officials at the Korea Communications Commission (KCC) can’t provide enough statistics for a detailed analysis, they say with confidence that the overall consumption of sex on the Internet has increased since people were enabled to carry liquid crystal display (LCD) screens in their pockets.
``It seems like everyone is carrying a smartphone or mobile Internet device all the time and they clearly aren’t spending all that time checking e-mail or browsing the Web,’’ said a KCC official.
``Of the top mobile websites accessed through mobile handsets last month, dozens of them were sexually explicit. With advanced technologies and more bandwidth, an increasing number of smartphone users are accessing porn sites, which brings forth the problem of addiction and also heavy data usage that could disturb the traffic of mobile-phone operators.
``It’s hard to control lewd content on mobile Internet platforms ― you will never be able to filter or encode all of them ― and the problem is that under-aged users are being exposed to these sex-related materials.’’
Since the release of the Apple iPhone in late 2009, smartphones have been enjoying exploding popularity here.
The country’s three mobile-phone operators SK Telecom, KT and LG Uplus had 15 million smartphone users as of July after reaching the 10 million mark just four months earlier.
KCC plans to mandate all three carriers to install porn-filtering software in their future devices that are sold to under-aged users, but the companies say that such measures will be futile.
``The core of the problem is that the porn sites are usually based outside of the country and the KCC has no control over them,’’ said an official from SK Telecom, the top carrier.
SK Telecom recently stopped offering its ``Hot Zone’’ adult-only entertainment service from its online applications market at the request of the KCC.
Critics are skeptical whether carriers will ever be motivated to curb users’ exposure to X-rated content when they generated so much traffic.
``Many default websites on mobile Web browsers directly or indirectly navigate the user toward porn sites, but the carriers have been lax about adjusting this problem. Porn certainly generates traffic,’’ said an industry executive, asking not to be identified.