| A view of the Seoul High Court. Court website capture |
Naver, which was fined for driving out competitors using its monopoly position and manipulating search results, filed a lawsuit against the Fair Trade Commission against the disposition, but lost.
Administrative division 6-1 of the Seoul High Court (Chief Bong-hee Choi, Gwang-ha Wi, Seong-wook Hong) ruled on the 14th that the plaintiff lost the lawsuit filed by Naver against the Fair Trade Commission for “cancellation of order for correction and order to pay fines.”
In 2020, the Fair Trade Commission imposed a total fine of 26.7 billion won, including 26.5 billion won for Naver for unfairly changing the ranking of search results and 200 million won for reorganizing the search algorithm to favor its own videos such as Naver TV.
Prior to the launch of open market services in 2012, Naver artificially lowered the exposure rankings of competing open market products such as 11th Street, G Market, Auction, and Interpark, and it was revealed that affiliated shopping malls were given preferential treatment so that they were exposed at least a certain percentage in search results.
Naver’s share in the open market market was 4.97% in 2015, but it grew rapidly to 21.08% in 2018. On the other hand, the share of competitors such as Company A (27.03% → 21.78%), Company B (38.30% → 28.67%), Company C (25.97% → 18.16%), and Company D (3.15% → 2.57%) fell during the same period.
It turned out that Naver gave additional points to videos that entered the Naver TV theme hall provided by the company to make them easily exposed to consumers, and did not give additional points to videos from competing platforms such as YouTube and Afreeca TV, even if the quality was good.
Naver filed a lawsuit against the Fair Trade Commission in March of last year, saying, “The search algorithm was adjusted to show the search results consumers wanted, not manipulation.”
Reporter Kim Moo-yeon