South Korea was Too Generous to Pre-loaded Google Apps Compared to EU

On April 20, the European Union ruled that Google violated the antitrust law. Under the circumstances, it is said that the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) of South Korea, which ruled the other way around three years ago, was too generous at that time.

Back in 2011, Naver and Daum filed an unfair trade report with the FTC with regard to the pre-loaded search app of Google. The FTC looked into the matter for two years and then acquitted Google. Since then, Google’s influence on the South Korean Internet market has increased at a rapid pace. Google’s share in the domestic mobile search market has been on the rise based on the pre-loaded Android app unlike those of the South Korean portals, whose apps should be downloaded by users themselves. Nevertheless, the FTC is maintaining its stance contrary to the EU’s.

According to the FTC, Google’s mobile search market share is approximately 10% in South Korea, much less than the percentage in Europe, many users use search services by installing the apps of the portals in spite of the presence of the Google app, and thus the current situation is not problematic at all.

In the mobile search market, however, Google’s share is rising rapidly to the point of threatening Daum, the second-largest player in the market. In other words, things have drastically changed since the period of the investigation by the FTC.

Besides, a lot of experts are pointing out that Google’s pre-loaded non-search applications are also affecting South Korean companies’ presence in the domestic mobile content market. At present, Daum is ahead of Google by a margin of more than 10 percentage points in PC search. However, Google beat Daum by a slight margin in mobile search in the first two months of this year.

In addition, pre-loaded Google apps account for about half of the most popular mobile apps these days. With the situation as it is, an increasing number of experts are calling for the FTC to re-investigate the issue.