Naver headquarters in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province / Korea Times file

By Kim Hyun-bin

The Fair Trade Commission (FTC) will examine unfair practices and the competitive environment in the cloud industry, which has seen drastic growth amid the pandemic.

The FTC announced that it will conduct a fact-finding survey on stakeholders including major cloud providers and cloud service users, Thursday.

Global companies such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft dominate the domestic cloud market.

As non-face-to-face transactions increased after the start of the pandemic, the size of the market has grown drastically due to the expansion of remote work and the need for efficient data management.

The size of the domestic cloud market was 4.2 trillion won in 2020, and it has been growing at an average annual rate of 16 percent.

Cloud computing is a fast-changing field requiring high technical expertise, and only a small number of companies have high market concentrations. As it is a field where competition can easily be restricted, the need to inspect the competitive environment is also being raised.

Competition authorities in the European Union, the U.K. and Australia have already examined the status of competition in key areas of the digital market.

The FTC is planning to examine the transaction status of the rapidly growing cloud market and competitive factors through a written fact-finding survey.

The first stage of the survey will look into major cloud providers, and for the second stage the FTC plans to survey stakeholders.

It also seeks to identify the competitive situation of the cloud market and adjacent markets, as well as transactional structures. The subjects of the investigation will need to submit data.

"We will proceed in accordance with due process, such as requesting data submission within the necessary scope and giving companies subject to investigation a sufficient period to prepare data," the FTC said.

The FTC said it will also look at the actual conditions of transactions in the cloud market and unfair practices, such as whether there were any behaviors that distort competition.

The survey results are expected to be announced in December.