Just a friendly tip: don’t go there. It’s hard to imagine a worse place than North Korea to be in the IT business. Let Great Leader Kim Jong Il enthuse all he wants about the prospects for e-trade development. Business people who have visited the place can only shake their heads. North Korea scarcely has a communications infrastructure worthy of the name. There’s one phone line for every 20 or so inhabitants. (South Korea has one for every 1.7 people.) Many telephones in rural areas are so primitive they don’t even have dials, never mind keypads–just an old-fashioned lever to ring the operator. Electricity is tightly rationed. But it’s as free as sunshine compared with North Korea’s real limiting resource: information. For half a century Pyongyang has kept a stranglehold on the flow of facts and ideas. News rarely gets into or out of the country except as the government allows.
North Korea is said to be the only country in the world without a direct connection to the Internet. Free access to information is what the Net is all about, and North Korea’s leaders are well aware that knowledge is power. They have no intention of sharing it. The Northerners have their own country code (kp), but no one has registered a domain name under that suffix. The country’s official Web site is www.dprkorea.com. Never mind. Only a few privileged Pyongyang residents have computer access and official permission to go online, and they don’t have to worry about the international phone bills they run up using service providers in China or Japan. A South Korean official in Seoul says the “great leader” spends as much as two hours a day surfing the Web. Kim made a point of asking Madeleine Albright, then U.S. secretary of State, for her e-mail address when she visited him last year.
Kim is the country’s No. 1 new-technology fan. “Without computers,” he has been quoted as warning, “one cannot escape from ignorance and stupidity.” Back in 1990 he established the Korea Computer Center to develop homegrown software. The enterprise now has 4,500 workers and about 900 programmers, most in their 20s and 30s. The North’s techies have created several banking and voice-recognition programs to help in trade with China, India, Iran and Pakistan. They created a computerized handbook for acupuncturists and wrote a software version of the ancient game of go that’s distributed in South Korea. One of their crowning achievements is the word-processing program Changduk. The key combination Control-J automatically types Kim Jong Il’s name in big boldface characters; Control-I produces the name of Kim’s father and predecessor, Kim Il Sung, in equally grand style. It’s a valuable feature for anyone preparing public documents in North Korea.
Still, the old technophobia persists. Recent travelers to Pyongyang say they were greeted at the airport by signs asking that all mobile phones be checked at Customs. No more than 1,000 North Koreans are thought to have such devices, and mobile-phone service exists only in areas frequented by Southerners, such as scenic Mount Kumgang. Why should the North’s authorities worry about wireless gear? They aren’t saying. “They may be afraid that satellite technology could be used to send intelligence,” speculates a telecom official in Japan. “Or they may not want their people to see foreigners using such a convenient tool.”
IT experts say North Korea’s greatest handicap is its isolationism. The country’s techies are not fully informed about what’s being done elsewhere. Instead they are designing software for an export market whose needs they don’t understand, in competition with products they have not seen. “What’s common sense here is not common sense in Pyongyang,” says a Tokyo-based businessman who deals with the North. Does anyone out there have Kim Jong Il’s e-mail address? Maybe you could send him a message.
