Google to comply with ‘Netflix Law’

The South Korean government has asked US tech giant Google to take preemptive measures to ensure stable services, while demanding the company notify local users in Korean language should there be service errors.

Google will also operate a customer service space through which users can ask questions.

South Korea’s ICT Ministry announced Monday its follow up measures regarding the global outage of Google’s services in December, during which users were unable to connect to Google products such as YouTube, Gmail and Google Calendar.

After the outage, the ministry asked Google to report back to the ministry regarding the service errors based on the revised Telecommunications Business Act, also referred to as the “Netflix Law.”

The ministry noted Google went through an authentication system error for around 50 minutes on Dec. 14 because it did not allocate storage space for the system during a previous maintenance session.

The ministry added that it has proposed the tech giant improve its service guide to ensure service quality here and asked the company to report back the changes.

According to the new law here, the government can ask large online content providers to report service errors and to take ample measures to provide stable services in the country.

The new law is currently applied to online companies that account for 1 percent or more of the country’s average daily data traffic in the last three months of a year, or firms with more than 1 million daily users. Global tech giants Google, Facebook and Netflix, as well as local platform operators Naver, Kakao and streaming service Wavve, are currently subject to the law.

By Shim Woo-hyun (ws@heraldcorp.com)