South Korea's Fair Trade Commission fined Naver 26.7 billion won for manipulating search algorithms between 2012-2015 to favor its own shopping platform and payment service over competitors.
South Korea's Fair Trade Commission imposed a record 26.7 billion won ($22.9 million) fine on internet portal giant Naver for manipulating search algorithms. The FTC found that Naver made algorithmic changes at least six times between 2012 and 2015 to favor products sold through its Smart Store platform and those linked to its payment service Naver Pay. The manipulation caused competitors like Interpark and Gmarket to rank lower in search results. As a result, Naver Smart Store's market share in online markets increased dramatically from 4.97 percent in 2015 to 21.08 percent in 2018, making it one of the top three online marketplaces in South Korea. Naver also manipulated algorithms to favor videos on its Naver TV platform. The company held an 80.2 percent market share in shopping search services as of 2018. The FTC stated this practice misled customers who trusted the search results were fair and objective, and damaged fair competition in e-commerce and video platform markets. Naver disputed the charges and announced plans to appeal the decision.
Domain classification, causal taxonomy, severity scores, and national security assessments were LLM-classified and may contain errors.
AI developers or state-like actors competing in an AI ‘race’ by rapidly developing, deploying, and applying AI systems to maximize strategic or economic advantage, increasing the risk they release unsafe and error-prone systems.
Human
Due to a decision or action made by humans
Intentional
Due to an expected outcome from pursuing a goal
Post-deployment
Occurring after the AI model has been trained and deployed