The Silence of the Damned.(North Korea)(Brief Article)

Are you pining for the lost glories of the great information-technology gold rush? Believe it or not, there's a virtually untouched market of 20 million people--hardworking, motivated and desperate for the freedom and mobility exemplified by the wired world. They don't know the meaning of the words "dot-bomb" or "bandwidth glut." They've never heard of Steve Case or Jeff Bezos. The place is virgin territory for anyone with a bit of e-talent and a dream.

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. ...