Viber faces outage in South Korea
Mobile messengers were under the threat of a ban in South Korea after Viber lost a patent dispute in court to SK Telecom, a telecoms operator. Now the cellular giant requires a ban on the use of iOS and Android versions of the Viber application domestically, according to TNW.
Earlier, a South Korean court ruled in favor of SK Telecom, which accused the owner of the Viber messenger company Rakuten of using the 2006 patent that regulates the “function of reorganizing selected information from contacts and keeping it in the application on the phone”.
Rakuten has not yet confirmed his desire to appeal the decision of the court in the appellate court. If the appeal is rejected or unsuccessful under the threat of a ban, all applications that add contacts from the phone to the address book of the instant messenger application will be included.
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However, Viber itself will suffer much less than its competitors - it has almost no users in South Korea. It is for this reason that many experts are inclined to believe that SK Telecom will go further in order to remove KakaoTalk from the market - the most popular instant messenger in the country, according to statistics installed on 95% of smartphones in South Korea.
Representatives of KakaoTalk have already stated to The Korean Herald that they are aware of the decision made by the court but have not yet contacted SK Telecom.
Earlier, a South Korean court ruled in favor of SK Telecom, which accused the owner of the Viber messenger company Rakuten of using the 2006 patent that regulates the “function of reorganizing selected information from contacts and keeping it in the application on the phone”.
Rakuten has not yet confirmed his desire to appeal the decision of the court in the appellate court. If the appeal is rejected or unsuccessful under the threat of a ban, all applications that add contacts from the phone to the address book of the instant messenger application will be included.
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However, Viber itself will suffer much less than its competitors - it has almost no users in South Korea. It is for this reason that many experts are inclined to believe that SK Telecom will go further in order to remove KakaoTalk from the market - the most popular instant messenger in the country, according to statistics installed on 95% of smartphones in South Korea.
Representatives of KakaoTalk have already stated to The Korean Herald that they are aware of the decision made by the court but have not yet contacted SK Telecom.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/286144/
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