In an ongoing effort to block what the South Korean government deems "obscene material," officials in Seoul on Monday announced the government plans to block 180 foreign pornographic websites by the end of May, as it continues its campaign against erotic content on the nation's major Internet portals.
The Ministry of Information and Communication head, Lee Tae Hee, said that, so far, connections to 211 websites had been blocked—most of them based in the U.S., as well as all local porn sites.
"By the end of May, we aim to block a further 180 foreign websites," he said, while estimating the total number of sites that Seoul would seek to block access to would reach 500-600.
Lee also said measures would be taken to step up surveillance of the Internet.
"We believe that the measure will be quite effective in dealing with obscene material in cyberspace, as we found most Internet users obtain such content from foreign pornographic sites and upload them on local portals," the ministry statement read.
The ministry also said it will increase monitoring of pornography and strengthen legal punishments for Internet users and portal sites if such material is posted.
The ministry's steps were triggered by a minute-long video with pornographic material, which had become freely available last week on leading Internet portals such as Yahoo! Korea, Daum, and Naver—which were also accessible to young people.
It took website administrators six hours to remove the video, after which further videos with obscene matter were discovered, and Seoul accused website administrators of inadequate surveillance of their sites.
Lee said one suspect had been found in the porn video incident and was located via an IP address. The suspect faced a possible one-year prison term and a heavy fine, he said.
South Korea is said to be one of the world's most-wired countries with widespread high-speed Internet access.
