Tag Archives: naver

Naver (NHN) Concerned about Fair Competition in Mobile

NHN concerned about fair competition in mobile search market

By Lee Youkyung
SEOUL, March 15 (Yonhap) — The head of NHN Corp., operator of South Korea’s most-visited search engine, expressed on Monday concerns about fair competition, arguing that users should be given a choice for a variety of search engines in smartphones, an increasingly popular gateway to the Web.

Normally, I’d heckle the poor Naver exec crying about fairness in the marketplace, but I won’t this time….other than laughing at the hypocrisy LOLOLOLOLOL!!! (ok, got that out of the way)

He’s got a great point here. There’s not even a way to change default search to Naver (or Daum or other Korean site) on iPhone (as far as I know) and I doubt there is on just about any other non-Korean phone (and probably not on Korean smartphones either). Microsoft is just implementing forced choice on its OS in Europe for a similar problem, is it too far afield to say that dominant mobile OS’s are guilty of the same? I’d say he has a case and, given the fact that he’s likely got some “friends” in the government, he’s likely going to pursue that case successfully. I’ll be interested to see what happens.

%d bloggers like this: