[Tech Corner] Monopoly of portal sites a reflection of society

There are growing calls for the current monopoly of Korean portal sites to bear greater social responsibility, as seen in the recent launch of the "Committee of One Hundred Portal Site Users," started by a major civic group. Perhaps aware of the current calls, portal sites have been changing little by little, by among other things assigning staff to survey users’ opinions.

Internet portal sites began in the United States in the mid-1990s and their popularity peaked towards the end of that decade. In 1999 you saw the beginning of "mass portalization," when America Online bought the browser company Netscape. Walt Disney went a step further and bought the search site Go.com and used it as a gateway to its online presence. The communications company AT&T joined the competition when it bought Excite.

When the dot com bubble evaporated, however, competition between portal sites lost its intensity. The only portal still in good shape in the U.S. is Yahoo!. According to Comscore, as of July, Yahoo! was the most popular site in the U.S. A diverse variety of sites filled out the rest of the top 10, including, among others, the search site Google, the auction site eBay, the community site MySpace, the online bookstore Amazon, and the site belonging to the communications company Verizon.

Korea is an entirely different story. Recent data suggests that the top four Korean websites are virtually indistinguishable portals. The only sites that rank in the top 10 and are not portals are a game site and two online merchants.

The monopoly of portals in Korea is a problem that will not be easy to solve. The excessive concentration seems to be a Korean phenomenon, Korea being a country where people tend to think they are falling behind if they are not joining the crowd - just as when 10 million people go to see the same movie in a period of three weeks. What Korea really needs is not to so much to make portals assume a sense of social responsibility as ways to create online diversity.