Korea's FTC expands digital division for stronger watch over platform giants

South Korea’s antitrust agency has realigned the ICT task force team to toughen its watch over multinational and domestic platform and streaming services in line with their ever-enlarging proliferation.

The Fair Trade Commission (FTC) Thursday announced its new digital market response team with expanded roles and responsibility. The previous ICT task force team that formed in November 2019 has imposed sanctions against Google’s market power abuse, and Naver’s shopping and video search algorithm manipulation for favoring affiliated contents and products.

The latest realignment is to better respond to the fast-changing digital market beyond the earlier focus on correcting the abusive market dominance by large platform operators.

For systematic and structural response, the FTC formed the new team with five departments responsible for digital monopolization, unfair business arrangements, customer protection, digital international cooperation and market communication.

The digital monopolization department will prevent and monitor any preferential treatment for affiliated contents or others by platform operators and practices unfair to competitors. Review of Google’s interference in Korean game developers service launch on other app stores and Kakao Mobility’s preferential treatment of its Kakao-membership taxis will soon be completed, the FTC said.

The unfair business arrangements department will file legislation to protect small merchants on online platforms and unveil the results of voluntary corrective measures against unfair practices by online booking apps to encourage voluntary establishment of win-win ecosystem in the industry.

New types of false or misleading information offered to customers will be monitored by the digital customer department. Withdrawal of subscription services will become easier. Operation of system for providing information and allowing withdrawal in digital content trading using metaverse or non-fungible tokens will also be reviewed.

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