Anonymity ruling boon to Netizens

By Yun Suh-young

The Constitutional Court's decision Thursday that the online real name policy is unconstitutional is expected to accelerate the scrapping of the policy.

The court made a unanimous decision that the Information Communications Law requiring the use of real names online violated people's freedom of speech.

Following the decision, citizens generally agreed that the ruling was appropriate.

"I welcome the move. It took so long for the decision, which should have happened earlier, to be made. I wish for a society where we can express our opinions freely", said Rep. Chun Jung-bae, a former justice minister and a current member of the National Assembly Culture, Sports, Tourism, Broadcasting and Communications Committee, on his blog.

Another blogger, Lim Jung-wook, said, "I don't understand why we spent so many wasteful years on implementing a policy that should have been scrapped from the beginning".

Channy Yun, another citizen, said he thought the country was "finally moving in the right direction".

On Friday, a day after the ruling was made, the Korea Communications Commission (KCC) said it will prepare alternative measures to combat online defamation.

"As the policy requiring identification online has lost its effect with the court's decision, we will find a way to strengthen regulations on defamation and disputes, while letting private operators regulate their sites autonomously", the KCC announced.

The policy requiring people to log on at sites with their names and resident identification numbers before writing comments was implemented in 2007 as a means to regulate malicious comments. This came after several people including celebrities committed suicide due to depression caused by the trauma of malicious comments made about them on the Internet.

Websites with more than 100,000 visitors per day had been required to authenticate their users' identities. Visitors had to enter their resident ID numbers when they used portals or other sites.

The court decision comes two years after an online media company filed a petition that the law was discriminatory.

"The system does not seem to have been beneficial to the public. Despite the enforcement of the system, the number of illegal or malicious postings online has not decreased", the court said in its verdict.

"Instead, users have moved to foreign websites and the real-name system became discriminatory against domestic operators. It has also prevented foreigners who didn't have a resident registration number here from expressing their opinions online".

There are, however, concerns that the scrapping of the policy may bring about even more malicious comments.

"In freedom, responsibility always follows. There is no freedom without responsibility. Is expressing one's opinion by saying nasty things freedom of expression? The policy is necessary to regulate bad comments online", a citizen wrote on his blog.

Portal sites and the KCC plan to prevent harmful comments from being written online ahead of the presidential election to be held in December.

At the moment, portal sites are self-regulating the comments by filtering out vulgar words or anything offensive and inflammatory.

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