Choi Mun-kee, the minister of science, ICT and future planning, on Wednesday said the nation’s most influential Web portal Naver was too dominant.
“(Naver) seems to have too much of the market,” Choi said, saying that when companies go over the line, they should switch modes to focus more on social contribution.
“Naver, however, still seems to be concentrating to much on making the pie bigger,” the minister said in a press conference.
He added that the “young CEO” ― Kim Sang-hun, CEO of NHN, which operates Naver ― appeared to be quite aggressive in achieving his goals.
Choi stressed that the government would decline from officially commenting on the recent investigation into Naver by the Fair Trade Commission.
The anti-trust watchdog recently launched a probe into the portal on allegations that Naver took unfairly high commission from companies for taking out ads on its Website. Naver currently has more than a 70 percent marketshare in the local search industry.
The investigation came on the back of a new government initiative aimed at weeding out unfair practices forced on small firms by larger and more influential companies or groups following an incident at Namyang Dairy.
The nation’s leading dairy company was found to have been twisting the arm of distributors to receive more supply than they could hope to sell.
Choi said he believed the FTC was going to be cautious in its probe.
By Kim Ji-hyun (
jemmie@heraldcorp.com)
