IP Democracy: North Korea's Doomed Effort to Black Out the Internet

The New York Times’ Tom Zeller Jr. has this piece today about how North Korea, however technologically advanced it may be in nuclear weaponry, is in the dark ages when it comes to the Internet.

Cell phones were banned in the country in 2004 and computer connectivity is strictly internal — very few institutions can connect to the worldwide Internet. No wonder that North Korea has been judged to be the “world’s deepest information void.”

As Oxford professor of Internet governance and regulation (what a cool discipline, btw) Jonathan Zittrain notes in the article, “any information leakage from the outside world could be devastating” to the Kim Jong-il regime. But, as the saying goes, information will out and that’s just as true for North Korea as it is for any congregation of human beings.

As Zeller points out, Rebecca MacKinnon has already cell phones are already creeping into the country via a black market forming around the Chinese border. How ironic that information is flowing into North Korea from China, a country with its own free flow of information problems.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on October 23, 2006 9:19 AM to IP Democracy