Both Korean government and internet companies have joined their hands in effort to combat against endless illegal porn or obscene materials that are constantly bombarding online users.

On March 9th, Porn video was uploaded onto Yahoo! Korea site for six hours and other major portals Naver and Daum also experienced similar problems. These Incidents brought high concerns for the highly internet savvy Korea. Following the incidents, Korea Internet Safety Commission (KISC) and related agencies and internet portals all agreed need for overall review of filtering and monitoring system.

The incident also made the Korean government to hold meeting with district office, police, investigation agencies and major portals (Naver, Daum, Yahoo, Google) and broadband companies(KT, Hanarotelecom) and PandoraTV(UCC site) to discuss the current issues and counter measures on the subject.

First topic in the discussion was strengthening the monitoring between the KISC and private sectors. They decided to monitor the Database of video movies and images on constant base, nights and weekends auto-filtering to rid of obscene materials. The KISC announced it will open 24/7 information center to provide information on harmful materials.

Furthermore, realizing that most of these obscene materials come from overseas, it plans to use DNS filtering method to address the problem. The DNS server converts the internet address. In case of separate DNS usage, the filtering is disabled.) In near future, it plans to use URL filtering method to check not only the IP and Domains but down into index and sub-directory as well.

It will also prosecute anyone who (whether administrator or the user) is unlawful to beef up the measure. The guidelines on the illegal information and materials will be made available to users and internet portals and UCC users to promote their responsibility. Meanwhile, public campaigns targeted youth and netizens is in the works too.

In relation to the government measures, some of the related UCC firms pointed out that the measure puts restrictions on them. The government affiliate said the measure is put in place to protect the youth from the sexually oriented unsolicited materials on the internet and not targeted for any particular industry.