NHN, the operator of the most used portal sites in Korea "Naver," is now charged with 227 million won in antitrust fine to the Fair Trade Commission. The FTC also stated NHN's monopolistic behavior in the Internet market, having more than 70 percent of the Internet search from Korea.
This first action by the FTC to rule over NHN for its monopolistic operation with Naver might facilitate further investigation of the government agencies to carefully analysis NHN's business progress until now. Having a huge amount of fine to pay and the government's observation from now on, it is possible that what used to be a creative decision making process might be slowed down after all.
Many other competitors have envied the success of Naver and put NHN on a lot of criticisms for having such a huge share in the Internet industry. Consequently, for many Koreans, when they open up the web browser, the first web page to appear is most likely Naver. The portal provides useful information including basic news to weather forecast, links to articles and blogs, and most importantly, a huge amount of knowledge database called "Ji-sik-in." One of the major criticisms NHN has been receiving is that they do not open up their datebase of Naver to other search engines unlike Google or Yahoo.
Of course, the company eagerly took an action insisting they will bring this to the court for the unfair charge against them. According to the article, NHN stated that since the Internet does not have any kind of barriers to entry, their success on Naver cannot be a monopolistic action.
In my opinion, having this kind of regulation over Naver is just a part of other competitors' jealous lobby to the goverment regulation because Naver is surely one of the best web sources where the information it provides is mostly accurate and productive. From basic new search to its blogs, photos and more, people are benefiting from the portal every day. Also, unlike other portal service providers, Naver is user-friendly, which means it's easy to use and not messy. I hope that instead of blaming NHN for its so called "monopolistic" behavior, other competitors would do the best work they could to compete fairly and equally with Naver.
20620042 entry # 9
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