Korea clamps down on illegal Net porn

SOUTH KOREA--The government and Internet companies have joined hands in an effort to combat illegal pornographic and obscene materials that are constantly bombarding online users in the country.

Earlier this month, a porn video clip was posted and left for six hours on Yahoo Korea's Web site. Major portals Naver and Daum have also experienced similar problems in the past.

These incidents have triggered concerns in the country, widely recognized for its high Internet penetration and tech-savvy population, and led the Korea Internet Safety Commission (KISC), related government agencies and Internet portals to unanimously agree that Korea needs to review its filtering and monitoring system.

The Korean government will hold meetings with the district office, police, investigation agencies and major portals such as Naver, Daum, Yahoo and Google, broadband companies including KT and Hanarotelecom, and PandoraTV to discuss existing issues and counter-measures to address the problem.

One area of discussion is the need to strengthen the monitoring between the KISC and the private sector. Both parties have decided to constantly monitor the database of video, movies and images, and put in place auto-filtering mechanisms to take down obscene materials. The KISC also said it will operate an information center round the clock to provide information on obscene materials.

In addition, because most of obscene materials originate outside South Korea, the KISC also plans to use domain name filtering to address the issue. In future, it also plans to use URL filtering methods to check not only IP addresses and domain names, but also file indexes and sub-directories as well.

The Korean government will also prosecute anyone who posts obscene materials. The guidelines on the illegal information and materials will be made available to users and Internet portals. Meanwhile, public campaigns targeted at youth and Netizens is also in the works.

Some "user-created content" firms have pointed out that the new measure puts restrictions on them. The government has said the move is necessary to protect the youth from the sexually-oriented and unsolicited materials on the Internet, and is not targeted at any particular industry.