The final curtain for online porn in Korea

I quite like the fact that the Korea Times is giving us insight into the top ten searches at naver.com every week. According to this statistic from over a year ago, Naver "controls more than 68 percent of local search traffic". And what we find out this week is that people are interested in porn, scantily clad women (and men, if you include 300), and online games, mostly.

Seventh place was taken by the hardcore online game "Sudden Attack." The game is age restricted to players over 19. However, some minors managed to sneak through security to play the game.

Minors like one of my eight-year-old students? Now I understand his stories about blowing people up with grenades, and catchphrases like, "Headshot!" (obviously, I'm not much into gaming). When I asked him how he plays since he's not 18, he just said, "I play when my parents aren't watching." I imagine it's more fun than watching this more than once:

Ninth on the list was "watch girl," who showed great dance skills in a video that was broadcast live on African TV, a renowned Internet broadcasting station. The video clip shown around 6 p.m. on Thursday featured four female high school students dancing frantically with their school uniforms on. Among the four, one wearing a watch attracted the most attention with her slim body and great dancing skills. As she could not be seen clearly, curious netizens launched their own investigation to find out who she is.

Those must be some dance skills, huh? Judge for yourself... (there's no sound)



While I understand that the "most popular searches" become more popular due to their making the top ten list and catching everyone's attention, I really can't understand why the 20 seconds of this girl dancing became popular in the first place. It must be due to a lot of people who didn't have a chance to see this:

Coming in fourth was "Yahoo footage," a porn video that was posted on Yahoo Korea, one of the nation’s largest portal sites. Around 6:10 p.m. Sunday, an Internet user posted a one-minute sex video on Yammy, the portal’s page for user generated content (UGC). More than 25,000 Internet users clicked on the video clip, making the footage the most viewed clip for a while. Unaware of this, Yahoo Korea left the footage on the page for about six hours.

But have no fear, the government is here to rescue everyone from porn!

The government Monday declared an all-out war against obscene video files circulating massively on Internet portal sites.

Yes! All-out war! This should last... for about a month or so. Or is that just for crackdowns? I get the durations of all-out wars and crackdowns mixed up sometimes. This time, however, the government may be ready for the long haul; as you can see from this photo, they truly are prepared to battle obscene video files.

The Ministry of Information and Communication said it will join forces with law enforcement authorities and portal site operators to set up an online surveillance system.

If there's one thing Korea needs more of, it's surveillance. We're also told that the government "will block around 180 such foreign sites by the end of May". Wow. All 180 of them. They really aren't kidding around this time, are they? I guess that's the end of porn in Korea. Just look at these other measures they're taking:

The Ministry of Information and Communication said Tuesday that it would suspend companies’ Internet services if they don’t take proper measures to prevent porn and other unethical material from circulating on the Web.[...]

Naver, the No. 1 portal, said it is a matter that goes beyond the law. ``We hope this can be an opportunity to improve the quality of UCC culture,’’ a public relations official said. ``Businesses should try to improve their monitoring systems. But in principal, it is the users’ perception on pornography that should be changed.’’

Yeah, but changing perceptions takes time, and the government wants to look like it isn't entirely useless, so it's time to launch a crackdown! Crackdowns and new laws managed to stamp out prostitution and get rid of all those migrant workers who overstayed their visas, right? I'm sure they'll work just as well this time, and porn on the internet will soon become just another page in Korea's 5000 year history.