North Korea on the Cusp of Digital Transformation
The Nautilus Institute www.nautilus.org North Korea on the Cusp of Digital Transformation Alexandre Y. Mansourov, Ph.D. Introduction North Korea has an underdeveloped telecommunications sector, but its government now demonstrates increasing interest in catching up with the modern IT development trends, and its population reveals insatiable demand for more robust and extensive telecommunications services. As a laggard in the global digital revolution, Pyongyang enjoys key advantages of backwardness – dramatic savings on initial R&D costs in the IT sector, the opportunity to leap-frog from exclusive reliance on obsolete and scarce landlines (which carry traditional telephone traffic for a meager 1.1 million customers in a country of 24.5 million people) to world-class 3G mobile communications, which gained almost 700,000 users in less than three years of operation, as well as some access, albeit restricted, to the leading open source IT technologies, software, hardware, and multimedia content. Its telecommunications market is still very small, stove-piped, non- competitive, and highly regulated by the oppressive government placing a premium on regime security as opposed to consumer demand and the developing tastes of its population. The North Korean regime, obsessed with secrecy and control, severely restricts and strictly monitors the access of its population to international TV and radio broadcasting, Internet, email, and telephone services. On the other hand, Pyongyang mobilized its limited resources to develop and push out the pro-government propaganda content via a handful of rather sophisticated official websites (see Appendix 1) and popular social networking sites (SNS) like domestic uriminzokkiri.com and foreign-based Tweeter (http://twitter.com/uriminzok), Facebook, Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/uriminzokkiri), and YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/user/uriminzokkiri), in order to portray a positive image of the country and leadership and promote its political and economic interests abroad.
[Show full text]