Domestic and International Portals Experience Service Outages Five Times in Two Months... Penalties Are 'Light Touch'

[Image source=Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy Reporter Kang Nahum] Major domestic and international portal sites such as Naver, Daum, and Google have experienced five outages, including access errors, within two months, causing continuous inconvenience to users. However, it is expected that the authorities' sanctions against the portal operators will be at a 'light touch' level.

According to the related industry on the 28th, Daum, a portal site operated by Kakao, experienced access errors for over an hour around noon on the 2nd. This occurred just two weeks after an error on the 18th of last month where news content was not displayed on PC and mobile.

Not only Daum but Naver also faced consecutive outages. On the 23rd, due to a Google WebView crash, apps like Naver on Android phones failed to run properly. The next day, the 24th, there was an access disruption for about 40 minutes in services such as Naver News, Cafe, and Blog. Then, on the 25th, Naver's enterprise cloud service experienced console access issues for about an hour.

Google, which caused the Android phone 'app outage,' also experienced errors lasting about an hour in multiple services such as YouTube, Gmail, and Google Play in December last year.

[Image source=Yonhap News]

The problem is that despite ongoing user inconvenience, it is difficult to expect penalties or compensation from portal operators sufficient to guarantee prevention of recurrence.

First, the Korea Communications Commission is examining whether compensation is possible regarding the Android phone 'app outage' caused by the Google WebView crash on the 23rd. This is based on Article 33, Paragraph 2 of the Telecommunications Business Act, which stipulates that telecommunications service providers must inform users of the suspension of telecommunications services and the standards and procedures for compensation when service is interrupted.

However, due to an exception clause in the enforcement decree of the law, it is widely expected that applying compensation to Google will be difficult. A KCC official explained, "The exception in Article 33, Paragraph 2 of the Telecommunications Business Act applies to free services without usage fees," adding, "Google Android, as a free operating system, may not be subject to this law."

The Ministry of Science and ICT has also requested related data from each company to accurately identify the causes of other portal service disruptions under the 'Netflix Law (Amendment to the Enforcement Decree of the Telecommunications Business Act).'

The Netflix Law imposes an obligation on content providers to maintain quality to ensure stable service and has been in effect since December last year. The law applies to value-added telecommunications service providers whose average daily users and traffic volume each exceed one million over the last three months of the previous year and who account for more than 1% of total domestic traffic. In Korea, five companies fall under this category: Google, Facebook, Netflix, Naver, and Kakao.

The Ministry of Science and ICT has stated that if fault is found with any portal company based on this law, it will take measures such as sanctions. However, since the maximum penalty is a fine of about 20 million KRW, there is speculation that the penalties will be disproportionately light compared to the inconvenience experienced by users.

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