More mysteries from Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt’s visit to North Korea.
A photo taken in North Korean by Eric Schmidt Eric Schmidt on Google+
North Koreans have SMS (for texting) and 3G networks, but can’t use the networks to get Internet or smartphones. They have a closed, Korean Intranet and some officials can use the worldwide Internet, but only if someone is watching.
That’s what Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt found during his visit to North Korea earlier this month. Schmidt posted about the visit on Google+ this morning, after speaking to reporters about the trip immediately after leaving Pyongyang Jan. 10.
With the tech they have already, it would be easy for North Korea to hook their citizens up to the global Internet, Schmidt wrote. But whether that will actually happen seems unclear. Schmidt’s daughter, Sophie Schmidt, made it sound almost inevitable in her account of the trip, which she joined:
[North Korean officials] seemed to acknowledge that connectivity is coming, and that they can’t hope to keep it out. Indeed, some seemed to understand that it’s only with connectivity that their country has a snowball’s chance in hell of keeping up with the 21st century.
On Jan. 10, however, the U.K.’s the Guardian talked with an expert who thought the Schmidt trip was a long way from an open Internet for North Koreans. “Schmidt probably wasn’t so naive as to think a plane ride to Pyongyang and meetings with officials would open the country to the web,” Martyn Williams, who runs the blog North Korea Tech, told the Guardian.
Google is not going to want to get involved with bringing the Internet to North Korea, as that would mean becoming associated with whatever terrible punishments the government might dole out to those don’t use the Web in a way the government likes, Williams said.
The Schmidts flew to North Korea with former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, who called their trip “a private, humanitarian visit.” The group saw North Korean tech, including face recognition and video-chat rooms, the New Yorker reported.
Western news outlets didn’t quite seem to know what to make of Schmidt’s intentions, but the Google exec wrote that he warned North Korean officials that they would fall behind without allowing their people to access the open Web. Sophie Schmidt wrote that she wasn’t about to enlighten anybody to her father’s thinking. She prefaced her blog post with: “No discussion of meeting details or intentions–just some observations.”
As far as we can tell, previous news reports about the trip never even mentioned that Sophie would be joining her father and Richardson. But her blog post might be the most detailed account yet of the tour, Williams wrote today.
Sounds like Schmidt’s trip to North Korea is nearly as closely guarded as the North Korea itself.
