Ministry announces guideline on stable online services by Netflix, Google

The Ministry of Science and ICT on Tuesday unveiled a guideline on a revised law requiring Netflix and other tech giants to improve their online service quality.

Last December, South Korea passed a law revision holding online content service providers accountable if they fail to maintain stable services amid growing complaints against streaming giants Netflix and Google after their services experienced a number of outages.

The revised law, informally dubbed the "Netflix law" in the country, stipulates that large online content providers, including Google, Meta Platforms and Netflix, as well as local rivals Naver, Kakao and Wavve, are also required to report service errors to the ICT ministry.

Under the new guideline, the online content service providers are advised to secure enough network capacity and to notify local users in Korean in case of an outage or service error.

Netflix and other service providers are also advised to strengthen the verification of service errors to preemptively detect such problems and to allocate a storage system to recover the content when an error occurs.

On Dec. 14 last year, multiple Google services, including YouTube, Gmail and Google Calendar, went down for around an hour globally due to an authentication system error. The company posted a statement on its Twitter account in English, but it did not notify local users. (Yonhap)