[2020 National Audit] Naver Shopping CEO Explains Fair Trade Commission Fines at the Political Affairs Committee

"Shopping Search Logic Revamp Unrelated to Excluding Other Companies," Firm Stance Expected to Continue

Yoon-sook Lee, President of Naver Shopping

[Asia Economy Reporter Jin-gyu Lee] Lee Yoon-sook, CEO of Naver Shopping, is expected to explain the Fair Trade Commission's imposition of fines at the National Assembly's Political Affairs Committee audit scheduled for the 8th.

Lee is scheduled to attend the Political Affairs Committee audit as a witness regarding the Fair Trade Commission on that day. The committee selected Lee as a witness for the audit on the 25th of last month.

On the 6th, the Fair Trade Commission imposed a fine of 26.7 billion KRW on Naver Shopping, accusing it of changing its search algorithm to favor its own products and not informing competitors. This is the first case of sanction for manipulating the search algorithm to preferentially treat its own products.

The Fair Trade Commission judged that Naver artificially altered the shopping search algorithm to place its own products or content at the top, while pushing competitors' results to the bottom of the search results.

On the other hand, Naver stated that the Fair Trade Commission's judgment is "the shopping search logic revision is the result of efforts to provide optimal search results tailored to users' diverse search needs and has nothing to do with excluding other companies."

In a statement released on the 6th, Naver said, "In the current online commerce market where domestic and international companies fiercely compete, Naver Shopping competes with Danawa, Enuri, etc., but not with open markets. We regret the Fair Trade Commission's judgment recognizing Naver's market dominant position," adding, "We plan to challenge the unfairness of the Fair Trade Commission's decision in court."

Regarding the relatively lower search weighting given to competing open market products, Naver rebutted, saying, "Weights were assigned to all shopping malls providing sales performance information," and "The Fair Trade Commission maliciously pointed out that Naver increased product exposure by assigning weights only to the sales index applied to its own open market products."

Lee is also expected to maintain Naver's position at the audit on the same day. Members of the People Power Party in the Political Affairs Committee are expected to focus their questioning on Lee regarding suspicions of Naver's algorithm manipulation.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.