Google and Globalization in Korea

The following is a letter to the editor that I wrote, published in the Joongang Ilbo

The Internet itself epitomizes globalization, and there is no more prominent indication of this than Google’s success. 

Because the Internet unleashes a flood of information, its users around the world now turn to Google to tame that flood and find the information they need. People in virtually every country of the world now “Google it” to find press coverage, images, videos and more.  Nevertheless, there are four nations in the world in which success seems to elude Google. The Financial Times, in an article accompanied by a map of the non-Google World, reported that Google has failed to achieve success in South Korea, China, Russia and the Czech Republic.  Here in Korea, the major media have made much of how Naver leads the search market and has so far beaten Google. 

However, this claim, like that on behalf of Yandex in Russia, Baidu in China and Seznam in the Czech Republic, is sheer nonsense. If you believe the apples and oranges comparison of these four search services with Google, I have a bridge to sell you.

In fact, the services all have two critical limitations. First, they answer search inquiries ONLY in Korean, Russian, Chinese, or Czech, respectively. Second, they do not search or “crawl” the entire Internet, instead focusing only on content in Russian, Chinese, Korean or Czech. Contrast this with Google’s stated mission, “… to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” 

A closer look at Naver’s success and the difficulties for Google here actually explains why Google must ultimately succeed in the Korean market. Part of Naver’s success is simply because Koreans feel more comfortable with a service presented entirely in the Korean language.  Despite the national campaign here to learn English, it is well documented that people here feel uncomfortable with situations that demand English, such as job interviews, meeting foreigners and surfing English Web sites. 

Naver also responds to a strong cultural need felt by many Koreans to know what other people are thinking. Hence, its most popular service is called “Knowledge-In.” Users submit questions which other Naver users are encouraged to answer, creating an ever increasing base of “knowledge.” 

The crucial limitation is that Naver’s database, because it is a Korean language-only service, effectively excludes most of the world’s knowledge.  In this respect, one can argue that Naver is more of a social-networking site than a search engine. Google, of course, allows searching in Korean as well as English and returns Web pages in both languages. 

Naver also relies heavily on “sponsored” searches, a model pioneered by Overture and Yahoo. With this business model, any company, organization or individual can pay to have its search results appear higher in the list of results from any search inquiry. 

Search results in Naver contain several categories of sponsored search. Consequently, commercial entities with the money to pay for Web-based promotion, dominate in Naver search results. So why must Google succeed in the South Korean market? 

The answer is because the flood of information that is available electronically and digitally via the Internet is multilingual. Although English may be the dominant language of international business today, other languages are important. Google’s robots search, or attempt to search, this entire universe of information on the Internet, whatever the language.  This explains Google’s interest in automated translation from one language to another and why its translation service now represents the best available machine translation. 

Whatever Google’s weaknesses, its global scope and goals are surely its strength.  Take a specific example from the field of education and study abroad, currently a booming business here. If a Korean parent or student does a search on Naver for “study abroad in the U.S.”, they will typically receive a page of search results that are sponsored by the dominant commercial study-abroad institutes in South Korea.  While those results may serve the promotional needs of private institutes, they may not fit the needs of the individual student or family.  They also may fail to contain the most current information placed on the Internet by the U.S. schools, colleges and universities themselves.  For such information - you guessed it - we advise parents and students to “Google it.”

For Korea to fully participate in the global information society, a higher portion of its students, teachers, government officials and business personnel will need to more effectively find and utilize the information available through the Internet. As things stand, this means embracing Google or a service like it, rather than simply enjoying the Korean-language province of the Web, which is now dominated by Naver.  South Korea has embraced the notion that English fluency is one key to its future role in the global information society.  The nation might do well to also monitor use of Google as an important index of globalization here.

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.

Google maps and Korea's urgent need to update internet regulations

The current South Korean regulations that make it impossible for smartphone users to utilize all the features of Google Maps in South Korea were written for an earlier, industrial era and may even be a product of the long Cold War.  While the Cold War came to an end around most of the world, it tragically lingers here on the Korean peninsula in the form of national division and the continuing military confrontation at the DMZ.  However, thanks to the digital information revolution, smart phone users from all over the world are rapidly adopting a variety of mobile, cloud-based services, one of which is Google maps.   In a pioneering effort that sheds valuable light on a country little known to the outside world, Google has even published a crowd-sourced map of North Korea. As Jayanth Mysore,Senior Product Manager for Google Map Maker wrote on the Google Maps blog "The goal of Google Maps is to provide people with the most comprehensive, accurate, and easy-to-use modern map of the world." A community of citizen cartographers built the map of North Korea over a few years and it was published in January 2013.
Ironically, citizens of South Korea, despite having access to the world's fastest and most advanced mobile communication networks, cannot utilize the advanced features of Google Maps to get around, find places and otherwise utilize location based services.  Why?   As reported by The New York Times in October, "Travelers who want to go from Gimpo International Airport to the Gangnam neighborhood of Seoul cannot rely on Google Maps. Google Maps can provide directions only for public transport, not for driving, to any place in Korea. Anyone crazy enough to try the journey on bicycle or on foot, directions for which Google Maps provides elsewhere, will be similarly stymied." The article further notes that "South Korean security restrictions that were put in place after the Korean War limit Google’s maps, the company says. The export of map data is barred, ostensibly to prevent it from falling into the hands of South Korea’s foe to the north, across the world’s most heavily fortified border. Google and other foreign Internet companies say the rule also prevents them from providing online mapping services, like navigation, that travelers have come to rely on in much of the rest of the world."
Earlier this year the Park Geun-hye administration announced plans to ease some of the internet regulations that affect Google Maps and other online mapping initiatives.  However, according to a recent report in The Korea Times, that is moving along slowly.
What lawmakers and policymakers in South Korea need to realize is how much harm is already and prospectively done to its economy by the use of regulations that, while well suited to an earlier era, appear anachronistic today.  In less than two months, the Winter Olympics will be held in Sochi and they are being billed as the first "bring your own device" Olympics, with an unprecedented investment in mobile communications infrastructure.   At the closing ceremony of the Sochi Olympics the torch will be handed over to representatives of the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics and over the ensuing four years world attention will increasingly be focused on South Korea as the host.  The number of international visitors to Korea will increase as the 2018 Games approach, and most of these people will be carrying smart phones with the expectation that the most advanced features of those phones, to which they've become accustomed, will work.  The time to update internet regulations to avoid embarrassment is now.

The Google Book Settlement: An Author's Point of View

I read in the New York Times this morning that the top copyright official in the U.S. has attacked the Google Book settlement with authors and publishers.  She claimed the agreement would allow Google to profit from the work of others without prior consent, and could put "diplomatic stress" on the United States because it affected foreign authors whose rights are protected by international treaties.
Regarding her first point, as an academic author myself, I have read the terms of the Google Book Partner program and wonder where the U.S. copyright official is getting her information.  Authors and publishers have the choice of whether to submit their works for digital publication by Google and should they make that choice, they have nearly complete control over how the material is displayed and distributed through the Google program.  Furthermore, they share fairly in any advertising or other revenue that may result from online display and sale of the books, something that was not the case under the old, pre-information age copyright system.
As an Academic Author, I think that Google's partnership with Creative Commons was a huge, positive factor that augurs well for the success of its books program and others who should choose to follow its example and compete in this new arena.  I have already submitted four books and two short monographs to Google for scanning and processing.  Two of them are live and you can read them, search them, or download a PDF at the following links:
http://www.jamesflarson.com/tvs-window-main.html  --Television's Window on the World was based on an expansion of my doctoral dissertation.  I wrote it in the late 1970s and early 1980s, at a time when there was great concern about the possible role of communication in national development.   Should you choose to read the Acknowledgements (p. viii), you'll note that I dedicated the book to people who live in the world's developing nations.   Now, thanks to Google, many of them will soon be able to read it, and many may first encounter it on a handset or Kindle-style reader.
http://www.jamesflarson.com/tr-in-korea-main.html -- The Telecommunications Revolution in Korea was based on two years of research in Korea in the early 1990s, with the assistance of many Korean colleagues, and the content relates rather directly to some of the concerns I express in this blog.  Were I writing it again, I would revise certain portions.  Nevertheless, it represented my best effort at the time (1995).
Back to the New York Times article and the U.S. copyright officials point about foreign authors.  If she was referring to academic authors, along with others, I fail to see the point.    Two more of my books that will soon appear in Google Books were co-authored with "foreign authors," one Korean and one from Spain. As co-authors normally do, we've talked about the Google Book Partner program and amicably and jointly decided to submit our co-authored books for digitization and publication on the web.
Finally, I would simply note that the old, print-only academic publishing houses are rapidly changing with the times.   Oxford University Press, Greenwood Press, Westview Press, and John Libbey were very willing to revert copyright to me and my co-authors so that we could submit the books to the Google project. Looking ahead, they and other university and academic presses are going to have to chart a successful business approach in an era in which there is a large, rather comprehensive digital library, mostly available to the public around the world.   In large part, we have Google to thank for this welcome new development.  

Why Google Must Succeed in Korea, for Korea's Benefit

I have read umpteen articles in recent months that note Google's lack of success in penetrating the South Korean search market.  As shown by the accompanying graphic, Korea and China are two stunning examples of markets in which Google is struggling.   Many of the recent media reports extoll the virtues of Korea's own search engines, especially Naver, with its "Knowledge-in" feature that is so popular here.  The clear implication is that Google's streamlined web pages, that return clean, well organized search results, are somehow inferior to the wealth of organized information returned by a Naver search.  In an effort to achieve some clarity here as to what is happening with "search" in the Korean market, consider the following:

• Naver returns only Korean-language results, coming from its own databases, rather than crawling the internet as googlebots do.
• Whereas Naver is a Korean networking site where you can search for answers to your questions in Korean, it does not even claim to search the vast non-Korean parts of the Internet.  Google has a more ambitious goal, to explore the whole internet, including all of its languages. 
• The preceding realities mean that search results in Google will typically be far more complete and comprehensive than those in Naver or similar Korean search engines.
• In addition to the scope or comprehensiveness of a search, there is the question of sponsorship bias, or the role of money. Google provides search results that help you find information about the topic of your interest, while Naver will tell you everything that sponsors want you to know and have paid for you to know about that topic. 

If you are skeptical about the last bullet point, take any search topic, open two tabs in your browser, and do a search for the term using both English and 하국말 as you please.  Earlier this afternoon, I did side-by-side Naver and Google searches using the term "Community College" in English and  "커뮤니티컬리지" in Korean.  The results are very revealing.  For an interesting blog posting related to this topic, see the Waiguoren's Weblog posting from September 2007.
Because the leading Korean search engine, Naver, has limited its search offerings to the Korean language, it is "searching" and building only a small part of global cyberspace.  While I agree that Korea and Korean language searching are very important, they should not be presented to Korean netizens as the ultimate solution to search.   In a sense, because of the realities mentioned above, the success of Google in Korea is an important measure of globalization and mindset here.  After all, why should Google not do well in Korea?  Google Korea is a Korean company, hiring Korean employees, and contributing directly to this economy.  Furthermore, its corporate goals seem to very compatible with some of Korea's central aspirations.  Ultimately, for Korea to succeed in the information age, it will need to be fully and seriously engaged in the internet search market, not narrowly focused on Korean-language-only social networking.  The success, even if moderate, of Google Korea, can be a great help to this country in achieving its economic goals.  The failure of Google Korea, in the absence of a better search algorithym and method, will not bode well for this nation.  There is a great deal more to be said on this topic.  More later.  In the meantime, I'd like to hear what the rest of you think.

Google sells Motorola Mobility, Agrees with Samsung on Patent Accord

Two developments in recent days offer a powerful commentary on the future of the global ICT sector, with direct implications for South Korea's leading smartphone manufacturers.
First, as reported in the Korea Joongang Daily, Samsung Electronics has signed a 10-year patent cross license agreement with Google that will prevent the two companies from waging a patent war against one another, a move the Korean tech firm believes will help further isolate archrival Apple. As reported in the Joongang Daily, the agreement that covers “a broad range of technologies and business areas” with Google. The “mutually beneficial agreement” covers not only existing patents but also new patents to be filed by 2023, Samsung said. The deal, analysts say, will help the two companies improve on each other’s weak points: software in the case of Samsung and hardware for Google. But Samsung is also expected to benefit from some of the hardware technologies that Google has worked on in recent years, such as robotics and wearable devices.
The second development was the announcement by Google that it is selling its Motorola Mobility division to China's Lenovo for $2.91 billion.  As reported by Forbes, "Motorola Mobility was Google’s largest ever acquisition at $12.5 billion in 2012. Page says the decision was made because of the “super competitive” nature of the smartphone market. “Motorola will be better served by Lenovo—which as a rapidly growing smartphone business and is the largest (and fastest-growing) PC manufacturer in the world,” Page said today. “This move will enable Google to devote our energy to driving innovation across the Android ecosystem, for the benefit of smartphone users everywhere.” The sale doesn’t mean that Google isn’t interested in making hardware to run Android. Earlier this month, Google spent $3.2 billion to acquire smart thermostat maker Nest and bought several robotics companies last year. Page made a point of noting that Google’s vision for smart devices like the Nest and Google Glass, its Internet-connected eyewear, remains a focus for the company."
The most immediately apparent implication of this move for Korea is its impact on the nation's smartphone manufacturers, led by Samsung and LG.

Google and Globalization, II

The Economist has a new article on Google's success, or lack thereof, in Asia.  It manages to get several points right, but in the end it fails to offer a complete and coherent explanation for why Naver does so well in the Korean search market and why Google does so poorly. I have commented on this matter before, in a post on Google and Globalization in Korea , and an earlier post on "Why Google Must Succeed in Korea, for Korea's Benefit."
As the Economist article describes, part of the problem for Google in South Korea has to do with language and culture.   In other words, Google may be able to improve upon its Korean language presentation and could make its services more appealing to Koreans, culturally speaking.   However, this skirts around the main issue.

• Google is a search technology that uses robots in an effort to identify and classify all of the information on the internet, whatever the language.
• Naver, on the other hand, does not search the internet.  It is a Korean-language database, created for Koreans, to help them collectively answer questions, which explains why "Knowledge-In" is the most popular service.

So, trying to make a one-on-one comparison of Google with Naver really is comparing apples and oranges.  As I have argued in earlier posts, the popularity of Naver, or the lack of success for Google, whichever way you put it, says volumes about the information culture in South Korea.  Use of Google for search is indeed one reasonable measure of globalization here.

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.

Google Korea to "Koreanize" its Home Page

The Korea Times yesterday notes that Google Korea plans to "Koreanize" its home page!   The article notes that Naver has a 66 percent share of the search market and Daum is in second place with 20 percent.  Meanwhile, Google has only 2.2 percent of the Korean search market.  The article also points out that Google's strength has been simplicity, but that now it is ready to compromise that to make its web page more attractive to Korean users who "have grown accustomed to fancy websites crowded with features."  The article then proceeds to discuss the load time factor, or how long it takes Google's home page to load.  Everyone knows that Google favors speed.   Number three of its "Ten Things" states that "Fast is better than slow."
All of this is interesting, but I don't think it gets to the central point of explaining why Google has such a minuscule market share in Korea.  For insight into that, do a search of this blog for "Google" and read one of my earlier posts on the topic, including this one.    I'd like to repeat some of the main points.

• Naver is not really an internet search engine, since it searches only Korean language materials and ignores most of the information on the worldwide web.
• Korea is one of four countries in the world, including China, Russia and the Czech Republic, that pursue this walled garden approach to so-called "internet search"  Coincidentally, while the rest of the world was enthusiastically adopting an innovation called the Apple iPhone, Korea was content to use its own, Korean-language only mobile services for two and a half years before bring in the iPhone to this market.
• The popularity of Naver versus Google obviously has a great deal to do with language and culture.
• Conclusion:   "Koreanizing" its home page will not do much for Google Korea's market share.  Language, culture and mindset issues are never solved that easily.   Perhaps a more focused approach, simply telling Korean consumers that there is a whole world wide web of English and other language information out there would be more helpful.

The Google Phone and AT&T: Implications for Korea

The New York Times this morning has two articles with direct implications for the evolution of the mobile communication market in South Korea.  The first of these is about the forthcoming Google Phone.   According to the report, Google plans to begin selling its own touch-screen Android phone early next year, a move that could challenge Apple's leadership in this market segment.  The company plans to use its brand power to market the phone directly to consumers over the internet.  Customers could then sign up for service with any compatible provider.  According to Google employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the new phone will be manufactured by Taiwan's HTC and will be thinner than Apple's iPhone with a slightly larger touch screen.  The phone has already been distributed to Google employees so that they can try it out with different service providers and applications.
Not surprisingly, analysts are reporting that Google sees mobile as its next big opportunity, and it wants more control over its destiny in this new environment.  Google wants more people using web-friendly phones in part because its advertising revenues come from this source.
Some of the implications and questions for Korea are rather obvious.

• Which mobile service provider(s) will offer the new Google phone?
• When will it be introduced into the Korean market?
• At what point will Korea's wireless networks begin to feel the effects of rising data usage, as AT&T is in the United States because of the iPhone?  (this is the subject of the second NY Times article.)
• How quickly will the use of these palm-held computers (iPhone, Google Phone, Android phones) spread in Korea?  I'm on record as predicting an extremely rapid diffusion!
• What will the arrival of the mobile broadband, handheld internet device era mean for data rates and subscription plans here?

South Korea's Differences with Google

The Hankyoreh newspaper is reporting some interesting background information on the fallout after Google refused to allow YouTube to accept the Korea Communication Commission's real-name system for posting comments or uploading content to popular web sites in South Korea.  The situation is showing signs of developing into a clash between the South Korean government, which is seeking to extend the application of its internet regulations to all Internet businesses, and the world’s largest Internet company, which is trying to maintain its principle of “freedom of expression” based on the option of exercising the “freedom of anonymous expression” on the Internet that it maintains elsewhere throughout the world.
An official at the Korea Communications Commission (KCC), who wished to remain nameless, said Thursday that the KCC was “in an uproar” over Google’s April 9 decision. “The people higher up said that they could not just leave Google alone and told us to find something to punish them with, so the related team is researching possible illegalities,” the official said.
On April 9, Google announced that it would be blocking users with South Korean nationality from uploading content and posting comments on YouTube Korea’s Web site, effectively rejecting the implementation of the real name system.
Industry experts suggest that the differences between the South Korean government and Google over how to apply the new Internet regulations reveals the fallacy of creating regulation that applies to only specific geographical regions on the Internet, which is a “network of networks.” According to the government, the difficulty it faces is that it is impossible to regulate Internet policy if it leaves cases like Google’s alone. Jeon Byeong-guk, director of the Internet consulting company SearchMaster.co.kr, says that the government and Google “have come face-to-face in a situation where there are no points of agreement.” Jeon added, “Since Google does not have a large share of the South Korean market, the question is what is to be gained from the government simply cracking its whip.” I would only add that it is not only Korea, but governments around the world that face this challenge in their efforts to regulate the internet. The inherently global and interlinked character of the internet demands global approaches to governance and regulation.

Google TV's Prospects in Korea

The New York Times is reporting that, despite setbacks, Sony is "optimistic about Google TV."  It could well be that Korea, with its world-leading digital networks and encouraging uptake of IPTV, as mentioned in my prior post, might be a market in which Google TV does very well.
Sony acknowledges that reviews of its internet-enabled Google TV have been mixed and Google itself has asked other television makers to delay new models until the software could be refined.  The Google TVs, which run on Intel’s Atom chips, are close to full-fledged computers. They let users search for keywords to find shows and see when and where it is being broadcast, as well as viewing links to Web sites about the show.
It appears that Toshiba, LG Electronics and Sharp have put off plans to demonstrate Google TVs at the consumer electronics show next month in Las Vegas.   However, Samsung still plans to show off a forthcoming Google TV model.  And why not?  Although the new, interactive, video-on demand and other services may take some getting used to, they undoubtedly represent a big part of the future market, especially with the digital network infrastructure available here on the southern half of the Korean peninsula!

The brief disappearance of this blog --a cautionary tale of the digital era

A couple of days ago this blog disappeared from the Internet for the better part of a day.   Here's why.
In early July I started receiving notices from Google Apps warning me that the domain registration for koreainformationsociety.com would expire at the end of the month if I didn't update my payment method.  What ensued over the weeks of July was a seemingly endless exchange of e-mail messages with a tech support person at Google, who--despite all his efforts--could not provide instructions that actually worked, allowing me to log in to the admin console for the koreainformationsociety.com domain.   Probably not surprising since I registered the domain nearly a decade ago when I started this Blogger blog.  At that time, so I am told, Google automatically set up an admin console and login.
At any rate, to continue the story, I have multiple Google accounts, including one's through Stony Brook University, the Stanford Alumni Association and a Google Apps for Work account of my own.  This did not make it easier to decipher the e-mail tech advice.
The solution, finally, came when I called and spoke to a tech representative at Godaddy who asked if I'd completed Google's online form to solve admin login problems with Google Apps for Work accounts.  This was the first I'd heard of this, but I proceeded to fill out and submit the form.   About 30 minutes after doing so I received a phone call from a Google tech representative who quite efficiently walked me through the process of updating my domain renewal payment arrangements.  It took the better part of an hour, after I shared my screens with him, but I now understand the whole process, including why the first tech support person had been unable to help.
Welcome to the hyper connected digital era!  I'm glad to have the blog domain reserved for another year.

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 has not yet begun to develop its mobile technology":Google's Expansion Plans

The Joongang Daily carried a brief report today about Google's expansion plans in Korea.   It noted the changes that Google is making to its home page.  I discussed this in an earlier post that referred to Google's plans to "Koreanize" its home page.
What really caught my eye about this latest article is the quote at the beginning, "Korea has not yet begun to develop its mobile technology."  As readers of this blog will note, I agree with the basic sentiment expressed by this quote.  As Cho Won-gyu, the head of Google Korea's research and development suggests, with the introduction of more smart phones next year, Korean consumers will begin to learn about many broadband internet applications from which they have been shielded to date.  Take for example video.  Although Youtube is now the most widely used video service in South Korea, it is not yet widely used on mobile phones.  Now that the iPhone is already here and numerous Android phone models are coming next year, that is about to change.  Given Google's strong array of web-based information services and their availability in Korean language versions, it is not too difficult to predict what will happen in Korea's mobile market next year.  Google will gain market share for all of its internet services, as Korea's customers become acquainted with them via the new Android phones that will probably come to dominate the mobile market here.

Privacy: Korean reaction to Google's new policy

A little over a year ago, Google announced a change in its privacy policy that received a great deal of attention here in Korea and around the world.   I did a short post about it at that time, but somehow missed a more in-depth treatment of the subject in The Korea Times.  The Korea Times article was accompanied by the graphic at the left (click to see a larger version).Google’s new privacy policy took effect on March 1, 2012. It "...consolidated users’ private information stored across 60 of its services to create one profile. In other words, Google will have a better access to user data collected from Gmail and Google search to YouTube and calendar to come up with more sophisticated targeted advertising."
The Korea Times article also noted that "The Korea Communications Commission (KCC), too, officially stated last week that Google violated the nation’s online privacy rule, which requires users’ consent before giving their personal information and to provide certain information in specific terms including how the company uses data, how long the data is stored, how users can erase it, and the contact information in case they want to file complaints of privacy breach. “We considered the new policy is vague and difficult to understand,” said Kim Kwang-su, a director of KCC’s privacy policy division. And Google doesn’t give an option of opting out, which is against the guidelines, Kim added."

Another Breakthrough by Google! Book Search Class Action Settlement

In its own understated way, Google has announced another breakthrough on its Google Book Search service.  The line on the Google Book Search page reads simply
"Google has reached a groundbreaking agreement with authors and publishers."
As the author of several books and monographs, I heartily agree.  I am hoping that there are no delays in the final court approval of this class action settlement, and I look forward to having all of my books available electronically and searchable via Google's new service.  Watch this space for notification of when you'll be able to read and search Television's Window on the World , Global Television and the Politics of the Seoul Olympics , The Telecommunications Revolution in Korea  and others of my publications.  By the way, Google has reportedly digitized more than seven million books!

"Citizen cartographers" help Google map North Korea

I have been aware for several years now of crowd-sourcing efforts to map North Korea using Google Earth. That effort is led by Curtis Melvin, who publishes a website called North Korea Economy Watch and who collaborated with the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies on a digital atlas of North Korea.
However, I was not aware as reported by the Wall Street Journal and other media outlets around the world,  Google has published a detailed map of North Korea on its Google Maps program, after years of a crowd-sourcing effort using its Map-maker program. The article reported that "On Tuesday, the company revised its Google Maps application to add information for North Korea—from naming streets to marking the outlines of prison camps—beginning to flesh out a national map that has been largely unannotated since Google started providing maps online and for mobile devices eight years ago."
The Map-maker program has already started to attract both serious additions to what we know about North Korea, and also humorous comments from web surfers around the world who obviously haven't much real interest in the country.  The problem facing Google's map-maker program, as with other crowd-sourcing efforts, is how to distinguish credible, sincere efforts to provide information from the equivalent of social media spam.

World Attention in the Information Age: Korea's National Image

In 1941 Harold Laswell, one of the social scientists whose work led to the creation of communication research as a field of study, wrote a thought-provoking article titled "World Attention Survey." Laswell's research tried to map attention patterns around the world by analyzing the content of newspapers, in particular the countries and issues mentioned in newspaper articles. My first book, Television's Window on the World, was based on my doctoral dissertation and attempted to do something similar with U.S. network television in the 1970s. Today, thanks to the internet and some new Google services, it is possible to do a "World Attention Survey," with much less manual effort than when Laswell was conducting his research or when I laboriously, with the help of research assistants, hand-coded television content for analysis in my dissertation. To illustrate the possibilities, I will show in this post how Google Insight, its brand-new service, can be used to shed empirical light on the question of Korea's national or brand image. In an earlier post, I showed how searches of Google News could be used to help analyze Korea's national image. Google Insight provides an important new piece of the puzzle about national image because it shows patterns of search activity on the internet by people around the world. If you doubt this, take a look at the results of the following global, unfiltered set of searches on Google Insights for Search. Just click on the links to see the results of worldwide search activity, from 2004 to the present, for each of the following terms.

• Korea
• Samsung
• LG
• Hyundai

If you took time to look at each of the results pages by clicking on each of the four links above and scrolling through the results page, you'll agree with me that several definite patterns show up.

• First, searches for Korea tend to turn up news of North Korea's nuclear test and related political problems. Not surprisingly, the topics covered by the 4,000 plus media sources in Google News and the search patterns shown by Insights for Search, tend to be highly correlated. Mainstream media coverage and global search patterns are both part of "World Attention" in this information era.
• Second, searches for Samsung and LG tend to center around information and communication technologies, notably television sets and mobile phones.
• Third, searches for Hyundai make it clear that Hyundai is viewed around the world as an automobile manufacturer, first and foremost.
• Fourth, the results for regional distribution of search behavior around the world show clearly that Korea's corporations have effectively established a presence in developing countries as well as those of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

These preliminary observations are based on a simple, unfiltered search for several terms. Obviously, much more could be learned by comparing search patterns across different countries or regions. However, I do think the results are intriguing. I assume that a majority of Google searchers around the world may NOT be aware that Samsung, Hyundai and LG are Korean companies, so that complicates the question of their contribution to Korea's national image. It also seems that the major mainstream media and their consistent focus on political problems or crises--currently North Korea's nuclear progam and the six-party talks--form a part of South Korea's image. This part of the image, however negative it may be, will be hard to escape short of reconciliation and eventually reunification on the Korean peninsula.

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.