Korean Job Discussion Forums

[charlieDD]

I've been hearing complaints recently from Koreans who say that the Americans control the internet and make it so difficult for Korean companies to operate on the web, or make it impossible for there to be Korean URL's (in Korean characters) and that they do the latter to control the Internet.

I have to remind them, . . Uh, it was, afterall, invented, created, built, funded . . by the Americans. Uh, . .

It leads me to wonder though: If the Koreans . . or the Japanese . . or just about any other country . . had invented / created the web, the internet . . . would it have been shared with the world for basically free?

I think more likely it would have been a very lucrative export product for a country like Korea or Japan; a Euro country, maybe shared in much the same way as the Americans have shared access to it, but probably more heavily regulated and higher registration costs and such.

ICANN, the American-based authority that "manages" the web, at least domain names/ ownership, is moving toward globalizing the web, but it's necessarily a slow process. They are trying to make sure it doesn't end up with the web / internet becoming fractured along country/regional lines and head off in all kinds of directions - - like a falling Tower of Babel and the resulting languages that drove people apart. But, Koreans seem to be seeing (once again) in an anti-American light; once again, they are being victimized.

[Qinella]

If Koreans had invented the Internet, they'd require national citizenship ID numbers in order to use it. That's a theory you can take to the bank.

[ChopChaeJoe]

I'm probably one of the few here who used the Internet before the World Wide Web, invented by a Brit, and I can tell you that it wasn't so hot back then.

Archie, Gopher, this mean anything to anybody?

[Moldy Rutabaga]

[....]

[Return Jones]

I'm pretty sure you could always make webpage addresses with Hangul. I remember first living in Suncheon in 2001 and seeing a lot of companies advertising their websites as http://insert-hangul-name-here

Don't quite know how that worked. At the time my Korean ability was about zero. Perhaps the trend is coming back around.

[Yo!Chingo]

If you want to do business internationally you use the roman alphabet. Period. No one is going to learn Hangul or Chinese to go to their websites to pay them $$$.
It's fine if they want to only do business in their own country,but don't whine when you're not getting any business from the outside.

[Privateer]

...we would right about now be learning what it was, because it would have taken them this long to come up with an English version, not because they didn't have good translators and designers but because first off they would have believed that only Koreans were capable of understanding and using it, then the translators would have been chosen based on seniority and nepotism not ability, then the marketing campaign to sell, yes sell, the internet to foreigners would have been run by incompetents so no-one outside Korea would have understood what the hell they were talking about, and, since all content would be determined by the chaebol, there would be nothing on the internet of any interest to people outside Korea anyway, no wonderful worldwide library of shared information, no technologies to take advantage of peer to peer networking and file swapping, but an awful lot of cute icons and web graphics that, probably, would catch on big time with the tweens and teens, that's if the cooler parts of it were even made accessible to foreigners anyway, since, despite massive fanfare, predictions of a Korean-led world revolution in technology and information, and an economic explosion of growth as a result, the actual internet made available to foreigners would be a barebones user-unfriendly version, much slower than the Korean one, and the games graphics would suck, and naturally an awful lot of confusion would be caused by the bizarre nonsensical Konglish employed on foreigner portals, which would share with Korean ones a standardised design, of an admittedly aesthetically refined basic format, with no bright pink or lime green, yet, unlike the Korean ones, by contrast conspicuously cluttered in the final result, be remarkably plain and unappealing, that is, until some enterprising soul took it upon himself to sell his country's valuable copyrighted technology under the counter, starting a boom in illegal copycat entrepreneur wannabes, that would soon, however, be eclipsed when some Chinese or American or Indian got hold of the technology, revamped it, turned it into something (at first) wonderful and exciting, akin to what it is now, leaving the Koreans to sink once again into obscurity but forever able to mumblingly complain to themselves how they were robbed - and by foreigners!

[numazawa]

Plus, Al Gore would still be unelectable.

[Hollywoodaction]

[Hollywoodaction]

[Yo!Chingo]

[twg]

There'd be a lot of pop-ups and flash banners screaming in your face continuously while the spyware and viruses run rampant on your PC because Dr. Virus doesnt work worth a nut.

[hogwonguy1979]

we'd all be reading alt.korea.s ucks.now instead of this

hey i remember using pine here to access email 10 years ago here

[JongnoGuru]

If Korea had invented...

... there'd be wall-to-wall pr�n, with non-Korean pr�nstars engaged in hideous, unspeakable hard-core filthiness, while all Korean pr�n would be essentially Confucius-approved steamy R-rated movies. And Kartrider. So unlike what we have today.

[jajdude]

Is there such a problem in learning the Roman alphabet, used by what, maybe half the planet or more? Like it's such a ton of work to learn the ABCs when you've already got IMF and KFC and a million other examples.

It's only a bit weird when you have some website like pharmacy.co.kr and figure, damn, a lot of locals do not know what 'pharmacy' means (even when it isn't such a scarce word here).