The Global Internet is Decentralizing: Where South Korea Fits

Telegeography has come out with a very interesting new report on Global Internet Geography that shows clearly how the global internet is decentralizing.   To see a full size version of the accompanying graphic, click on it. According to the report, .the global Internet is far less centered on the United States than it was 10 years ago. The development of rich regional networks, coupled with a need for diversification, has reduced the share of international capacity connected to the U.S. for all regions except Latin America.
The report also notes that the shifting topology of the global Internet is tied to the desire to locate content nearer to end users and, ultimately, reduce latency. Several carriers reported that improved routing efficiencies, largely attributable to the caching and localization of content, have reduced traffic on their interregional links and led to more rapid growth on local and regional links. (I have put "localization" in bold to emphasize it.).
The desire to locate content nearer to end users is something that will be apparent to any Korean internet user who has impatiently waited for web pages hosted on servers in the U.S. to respond.   The localization of content is a much more important matter, especially here in South Korea.   This nation, despite possessing the world's most extensive and advanced digital networks, stands out as only one of four countries in the world where Google does not yet have a respectable market share for web search.  See my post in late 2009, before the late arrival of Apple's iPhone here.  The internet in Korea, despite its dazzling networks, is still largely a walled garden ( if you doubt that, do a search of this blog for "walled-garden" to read some of my other posts.)  The vast majority of web surfing done by Koreans is done right here on within the southern half of the peninsula, using Naver, Daum and other popular Korean language sites.  This fact alone says volumes about the nature of the internet and the nature of Korea's information society.  I suspect that similar patterns elsewhere in the world account for the Telegeography findings.  What does all of this say about the role of language and culture in 21st century communications and the potential role of the internet in promoting global awareness?   While the younger generations here in Korea are beginning to search the worldwide web using Google, thanks to the arrival of smartphones in late 2009, these are questions that deserve to be examined in some detail.

Google's Acquisition of Motorola Mobility: Its Impact in Korea

Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility is making big news around the world, but particularly here in Korea, home of two major handset manufacturers, Samsung and LG.  As noted by The Chosun Ilbo, Google's US$12.5 billion takeover of Motorola Mobility not only allows the search giant to obtain a portfolio of more than 17,000 patents but also gives it the capability to roll out cheap-and-cheerful smartphones within a year or two.
The same paper published an opinion piece entitled "Korean IT Industry Needs to Make Fundamental Changes." It reads in part,
"The world's largest Internet company Google has acquired Motorola Mobility, the mobile phone unit of the U.S. company. So far Google has supplied its Android operating system free of charge to smartphone and tablet PC manufacturers, but now it has gone beyond the software industry and entered the hardware market. Motorola ranks eighth in the global smartphone market, but it is still a formidable force. The company was the first to market a mobile phone in 1973 and has around 17,000 mobile communications patents.
The smartphone market is divided between Apple's iPhone, which has an 18 percent stake, and Android-based handsets, which control 48 percent. Microsoft, another software powerhouse, has already teamed up with Finland's Nokia and is competing fiercely for a larger slice of the pie. Amid rumors that Microsoft may buy Nokia, we cannot rule out the possibility that the global smartphone market could be dominated by Apple, Google and Microsoft, which all have both OS development know-how and handset manufacturing capability."

Apple, Google in Violation of Korean Law

As reported in the Joongang Daily, South Korea’s telecommunications regulator announced yesterday that Apple and Google’s location tracking capabilities violate Korean laws, fining Apple Korea and ordering that both companies rectify the issues.The Korea Communications Commission (KCC) has been investigating since April, after two computer engineers argued that the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS 4.0, keeps track of users’ locations as far back as June 2010, which was when the operating system was launched. That caused controversy worldwide.
While the Korean government was hardly alone in launching an investigation into location tracking issues, it is the first in the world to actually declare that Apple and Google violated laws and order punitive measures.
According to Location Information Law Article 15, when businesses seek to collect, utilize and offer people’s location data, they should get their consent. Furthermore, Location Information Law Article 16 dictates that businesses take protective technological measures to prevent the data from being exposed, falsified or damaged.
“We haven’t been tracking anyone,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said earlier this year. “The files they found on these phones were basically files we have built through anonymous, crowd-sourced information that we collect from the tens of millions of iPhones out there.”
Google also explained that “all location sharing on Android is an opt-in by the user.” When a user activates an Android phone, a screen appears saying Google will collect anonymous location data.

KT "Gives Wings to WiBro" with Google Chrome Book

Amid all of the industry discussion about LTE, it seems that many have relegated mobile WiMax (a locally developed technology referred to as WiBro here in Korea) to a future market niche, mainly in developing countries around the world.  However, here in Korea, where major mobile service providers have been building out their WiBro networks nationwide, an interesting development has been announced by KT.  According to a major electronics newspaper, Korea Telecom has chosen the Google Chrome Book as the main device for its 4G WiBro Service. “We are planning to launch the Chrome Book in Korea in the latter half of this year and the whole new laptop especially suitable for cloud computing environments will be marketed as a package along with our WiBro router Egg,” said KT, adding, “We are also giving a thought to releasing the Chrome Book having a built-in WiBro communications chip in cooperation with handheld makers.” KT is also mulling over linking the U-Cloud, its own cloud computing service, with the laptop.
Having used WiBro a few years ago on a bus moving along the Han River at over 70 kilometers per hour, I expect that a WiBro equipped Chrome Book might be very popular indeed.

My Thoughts on the Apple Cloud

Just for the record, my reaction to the announcement of the "Apple Cloud" by Steve Jobs, was to think that his company had conceded defeat in the marketplace to Google, which has led the world in the development of content and services for cloud computing.   Obviously, reporter Kim Yoo-chul of The Korea Times shares this opinion, as reflected in his Reporter's Notebook Piece today.

Yonsei Architecture Students Credit the Internet for Win in International Competition

As reported in the Joongang Daily, four Yonsei University architecture students won the grand prize in an international landscape architecture competition organized by the National University of Columbia.  The competition was to design a museum for the city of Medellin, considered the second most important city in Columbia. The students, who had never been anywhere near Colombia, used the Internet and satellite maps such as Google Earth to learn about the city’s history and culture as well as understand the landscape of the city and its geographical features. “We were able to overcome the limitation of not being able to visit the city in person by using the Internet,” Kim said, adding that “the fact that none of us had visited the place stimulated our curiosity.”

Seoul Police Raid Google Korea's Offices

The global controversy over collection and use of location data from Apple and Android smartphones has taken a new turn in Korea.   The media today, including both the Chosun Ilbo and the Joongang Daily, are reporting that the Seoul Metropolitan Police raided Google Korea's offices in Yeoksam-dong. (click on the accompanying graphic to see a full size version)
According to the Chosun Ilbo account, Police said members of their cyber unit conducted the raid Tuesday. They carried away hard drives and other equipment related to Google's AdMob unit, which is suspected of collecting personal location information without authority or permission.The probe is not directly related to a previous investigation of Google in Korea. That probe concerned the incidental collection of personal data while Google cars were cruising through neighborhoods and taking photographs for the company's Street View service.

Google Under Scrutiny in Korea

Even in this information age, the major nations and cultures of East Asia often seem inscrutable to the mainstream western press. Since mid-April, the international media, led by business writers and technology blogs have been abuzz with news from South Korea. There, two leading internet portals, Naver and Daum, had lodged a complaint against Google with the Korea Fair Trade Commission, the nation’s competition and antitrust regulator. They alleged that Google unfairly used its status in the mobile industry to make it difficult or impossible for competing search services to be installed on Android devices in Korea. By forming a marketing partnership with major smartphone producers, so the complaint reasoned, Google had unfairly created a new ecosystem in which the Android system was offered free as a way to control the market.Furthermore, Google’s 15-20 percent share of Korea’s mobile search market could not possibly reflect the free choices of mobile carriers and manufacturers since Google controls only a small single-digit share of fixed line internet search in Korea. Google responded to the complaint with a statement that “carrier partners are free to decide which applications and services to include on their Android phones.” However, as widely reported thus far, news of the complaint against Google in South Korea fits into a familiar and most plausible story line. Many reports have explicitly linked Korean developments to the investigation of Google launched last year by the European Commission, and the complaint filed earlier this year by Microsoft. While this story line may be accurate, as far as it goes, it does not go far enough. The developments in Korea deserve closer scrutiny with a bit more historical and cultural context. The following elements should be added to the story to more adequately understand what is occurring with the complaint against Google. First, an acknowledgement that South Korea led the world in constructing nationwide, fast, fiber-optic broadband internet networks. When U.S. Vice President Al Gore spoke in 1994 of the need for an “information superhighway”, Korea acted the following year by implementing its ambitious Korea Information Infrastructure (KII) plan. By 1999, the year Naver was launched, PC Rooms had spread throughout Korea and with them such popular multi-player online games as World of Warcraft. The Korean social networking service Cyworld also debuted that year, half a decade before Facebook was invented! Second, while Naver is unquestionably Korea’s most popular internet portal, it is not at all an internet search engine like Google. Naver’s most popular feature, called “Knowledge-in” allows Koreans to input questions that are then answered by other Koreans online. Moreover, regular searches on Naver return pages on which paid advertisements top the results. When compared with Google, Naver appears as a large, Korean-language intranet with social networking and collective intelligence capabilities, rather than a comprehensive internet search tool. Its success underscores the centrality of language to web-surfing behavior. Third, although much of the international reporting mentions the rapid diffusion of smartphones in South Korea, with over ten million currently in use, some relevant history is generally ignored. Although introduced in the U.S. in mid-2007, Apple’s iPhone did not reach the South Korean market until two and a half years later! The combined interests of Korea’s mobile service providers, large handset manufacturers, and government policies led to this unusual set of circumstances. Although Korea was the first nation in the world to commercialize CDMA technology and build nationwide networks with it, public use of these 3G data services remained at extremely low levels through mid-2009, even as the iPhone was proving immensely popular all around the world. Consumers were put off by the high cost of such services, while Korea’s mobile service providers feared the loss of voice revenues to the new VOIP services like Skype. Finally, the extraordinarily rapid diffusion of smartphones here in South Korea, owing partly to pent-up demand, has a decidedly youthful cast. The same young people who were loading Skype onto their iPod Touch devices while awaiting the arrival of the iPhone in 2008 and 2009, and who studied English more avidly than their parent’s generation, were early adopters of the iPhone and Android devices. Interpreted within the above background context, the recent complaint against Google in South Korea has alternative explanations that do not fit so neatly with the story line advanced by most international media. It arose partly out of a natural reluctance on the part of Daum and Naver to see their market share internet search slipping away with the introduction of smart phones. Other explanatory factors are language and more global patterns of internet use by young people. Google’s growing share of Korea’s mobile search market may in fact be driven by web surfers who are discovering a great deal of English and other language content on the wide internet beyond the current search capabilities of Naver. This would also explain why it is not only Google’s share of search that is increasing with the adoption of smart phones, but also use of Facebook and Twitter, social marketing innovations that, like Google, originated in the West.

Local Search Engines File Complaint Against Google

The Korea Times carried an article with additional detail on the complaint filed against Google by local Korean search engines.  I recommend it for those of you interested in more in-depth analysis of this issue.

Content Farms! A Nuisance to be Dealt With.

This morning, as usual, I looked through my Google Alerts and read a number of newspapers, all online.  The internet is a wonderful tool for finding information, if properly used.  However, it is also vulnerable to abuse by spammers, creators of malware, and those who seek to make money through the creation of the so-called "content farms."  These websites offer no new thinking or analysis and do not create their own content.  Instead, they use code to aggregate existing content on the internet, building on others intellectual property in hopes of attracting unsuspecting netizens.
This morning I ran across a site purporting to provide information about "Telecommunications in North Korea," a topic that I regularly follow.  The site, which shall go unnamed here, has a generic sounding name that might appeal to expats living and working overseas.  It's homepage contains no information whatsoever about North Korean telecommunications, instead carrying only advertising, and links through which you might "subscribe to this forum" or "register and participate."
Unfortunately, some people surfing the internet will be gullible enough to be drawn in by such schemes.  One litmus test for any website is whether the home page has an "About" tab or a paragraph clearly telling visitors who sponsors the web site, who creates the content, and the purpose of it.  In general, it is wise to avoid reading content or following links on sites that do not clearly and openly identify themselves.
I'll be pleased to answer questions or elaborate on this topic, in hopes of undermining the efforts of such "content farms" to attract traffic.

Language and Internet Use in Korea

An article in The Korea Times today touches on a topic which was the subject of many earlier posts on this blog (for example this one),  the important role of language in conditioning the web-surfing patterns of most Korean citizens. It notes that the internet has become the first source of information for many people, but expresses doubt that most Koreans make use of most of the information available on the web.“Text in Korean makes up less than 1 percent on the Internet. The remaining 99 percent has been useless,” says Lois Kim, head of PR and marketing for Google in Korea.  The article then proceeds to note progress in machine-translation technology, led by Google.  Improvements in such technology promise to open up a vast new world of content for Korean netizens.  I'm wondering if good translation alone will have this result or if there is more to it, such as cultural preferences for activities, topics, and so forth.  Comments welcome.

National Police Agency Says Google Illegally Collected Private Data

The National Police Agency's cybercrime unit yesterday said they found evidence that Google illegally collected private data while producing its street view mapping service in Korea.  As reported in the Joongang Daily, police last August confiscated 79 hard disks at Google's Seoul office in Yeoksam-dong. After decoding passwords on the disks, which took several months, “We discovered e-mails and online chats individuals exchanged through [unencrypted] Wi-Fi networks,” said a police official.  The police have been investigating 10 Google employees in Korea and the United States.  Similar investigations are taking place in the U.S., Canada, Spain, Australia and Germany.  According to The Guardian, investigations are underway in 20 countries around the world.  Google started collecting street images in Korea in October 2009 using SUVs equipped with nine cameras, similar to the one shown in the accompanying graphic from The Guardian.
Google said it was "profoundly sorry" for mistakenly collecting the so-called "payload" data and vowed to continue to cooperate with South Korean authorities. "As soon as we realised what had happened, we stopped collecting all Wi-Fi data from our Street View cars and immediately informed the authorities," Google's Korean arm said.

Long-term Media Trends--Evidence from Google's Ngram Viewer

I couldn't resist playing with Google's new Ngram Viewer, a program that an article in the The New York Times described as "Google's 500 Billion Word Haystack."  Plug in some of the major communication media of the twentieth century and the Ngram Viewer returns the accompanying line graph (click on the graphic to see a full size version).  The telephone and newspapers received considerable mention in English language books throughout the century, with a bit more attention around 1940 than at any other time.  Mentions of radio soared during the World War II era.  Mentions of television began to increase around 1950 and continued to do so until the year 2000.   It comes as no surprise that mentions of the internet begin in the 1990s, a pointed reminder of how recent a phenomenon this everyday communication tool is.  Although we may use the internet daily, we still use it for listening to the radio, watching television or reading newspapers, among other things.

Google's Transparency Report and Government Requests From Korea

I noticed a bump up in traffic to this blog over the past few days and then found that R. Elgin had called this a "neat blog" in a post over at The Marmot's Hole.   Thank you for that!   In the same post he noted a Joongang Ilbo report about the Korean government's requests for information from Google.  I'd seen the same article and this prompted me to look more closely at Google's transparency report.

During the first half of 2010, according to Google's data, the Korean government requested the removal of web content 38 times, involving a total of 8,549 items.  The Google report indicates that 100 percent of the removal requests were "fully or partially complied with."  As reported in The Korea Times, the number of removal requests was the largest in Asia and the sixth highest worldwide.

Why so many removal requests from the Korean government?  The vast majority of such requests, according to Google Korea, are for removal of URLs that contain personal information in the form of Korean resident registration numbers (RRNs), which contain date of birth, gender, registration region, and registration order.

The Korea Times article also noted that Google's transparency report did not disclose similar data for China because, according to Google "Chinese officials consider censorship demands to be state secrets, so we cannot disclose that information at this time."  

Korea's Response to Google and Apple

To readers of this blog, please know that I'm still alive and well.  It is just that I've been a bit busy with other things at work and at home and have not been able to post much in the last several weeks.  However, I have been following the press and the trade publications that cover South Korea's IT sector and cannot help but comment on the overall response to the popularity, worldwide and in Korea, of products being sold by Google and Apple.
Today, for example, The Korea Times carried a report that LG was about to unveil the "1st Smart TV."  This would be a television set equipped with "Netcast 2.0" for web-connected televisions.  This move by LG was clearly a response to moves by Apple and Google, along with its Korean arch-rival Samsung.
The situation is somewhat similar with smart-phones and notepad sized devices.  Samsung and LG are scrambling to come out with their own devices that might compete with Apple's iPhone and Android-based digital devices.
What is the common denominator in all of the reports I'm reading? It is simply that South Korea is still heavily reliant on the manufacture of communications hardware, rather than content or software.  It is the latter that not only makes up the bulk of the global ICT market, but also represents the major hurdle for Korea to continue its remarkable advance as an "IT Powerhouse" or a knowledge economy.  The transition to greater emphasis on software and content in Korea has begun, but it will be a long-term challenge for the country to succeed.  This challenge will be the subject of future posts.

Some Context for the Police Raid on Google Korea Offices

Press reports provide additional context surround the policy raid on Google Korea's offices, as noted in my previous post.  As reported in The Korea Times, the raid here was unexpected, as the company had been talking closely with the Korea Communications Commission on how to handle the data it had collected.  Talks with the KCC were reportedly focused more on retrieving the data than on destroying it and the police raid came as a surprise.  Korea is one of about a dozen countries, including the U.S., Canada, Germany, France, Britain and Australia, that are investigating whether Google broke their privacy laws in pushing out he localized versions of street view.

Korean Cultural Treasures Now Being Shown on YouTube

I was very happy to learn via a short article in the Chosun Ilbo, that Korea is beginning to share videos of its cultural treasures on a YouTube Channel.   This is one small example, but a very good one, of how South Korea can go about improving its national image.  I could imagine the Korean heritage channel on YouTube being supplemented by channels dealing with many other interesting topics about Korea.  Meanwhile, this cultural heritage YouTube channel is a very good start.

Google versus Naver in the Mobile Broadband Era

I read an interesting short article in Telecoms Korea today that confirmed my thinking.  To be specific, I thought that the introduction of the iPhone and Android-based phones in Korea would quickly begin to erode Naver's monopoly on web-based search here in Korea.  That appears to be what is happening.  According to the article "Although Naver is a leading search engine on the web, NHN has felt threatened from Google in conjunction with the expansion of Android-based smartphones in the local market. Google services, including mobile search, are offered by default on Android smartphones and the iPhone, and Google is gaining popularity with Korean mobile users and on the web."  Enough said. 

More on Naver versus Google in the Mobile Market

The Korea Herald carried an article that provides some interesting detail on the changes taking place in internet search with the introduction of the iPhone and Android phones here.  Although Naver is still far ahead of Google in both the PC and mobile web market, the gap is smaller in the mobile arena.
Google, which held a single digit share in the PC web market, grabbed a 23.1 percent share in the mobile web market in January, according to the local market research firm Matrix. Naver controlled 82.6 percent of mobile web usage that month.  However, I suspect these figures lump iPhone and Android users with users of the older feature phones that still predominate.  Also, as Hugo Barra, Product Management Director at Google noted, with Android devices coming to Korea a whole new ecosystem of cloud computing based applications will be born.

Naver Complains of Google Monopoly in Smartphones!

NHN, the provider of South Korea's popular Naver search service, is unhappy with the smart phone market, where it claims rival Google is squeezing other companies out of business.  Samsung Electronics Android phones set Google as the default search engine, while Apple's iPhones use the Safari browser in which Google shows up by default.  NHN CEO Kim Sang-hun said it is "virtually impossible" for competitors to enter the market as only Google is connected.  "Users must be able to choose which search engines to use."   For the full story see today's Chosun Ilbo English edition.
I have commented extensively on Google's lack of success in the Korean market in earlier posts.  Naver does not really search the internet, but rather provides social information of value to Koreans, in the Korean language, and within what is essentially a Korean intra-net within the much, much larger internet.  I still stand by my earlier  arguments, but would only add that Google's services go well beyond search.   Google Earth (which is not available on the iPhone in Korea--why?), Google maps, Google Books and an array of other content and services are attractive to smart-phone users.  Over the past two and a half years, while Naver was building up its business within the Korean-language intranet with its Korean-language only service, Google was investing significantly in location-based services, and other services relating to books, scholarly documents, cloud-based applications, to name just a few.