North Korea's homegrown web for elite only
Reuters in Beijing
March 24, 2001North Korea, believed to be the only country on earth without the Internet, has built a national intranet network used by more than 1,000 people each day, China's official Xinhua news agency reported on Friday.
The "Kuang Myong" (bright) network boasts "every feature of a well-established network - a search engine, an electronic information system, a homepage search engine and a data transmission system", Xinhua said in a report from Pyongyang.
"Kuang Myong Net will become part of our daily life, just as the way America On-Line does to the Americans," the agency quoted Li Hyok of the Korean Central Science and Technology Information Agency as saying.
The network is accessible only inside North Korea and content is mostly limited to science and technology. It linked scientific research institutes, universities, factories, some individuals and central and local government departments, Mr Li said.
Mr Li said his agency had posted more than 30 million scientific documents on the network, which also provided television programme guides and an on-line system that translates English, French, German, Chinese, Japanese and Russian into Korean.
Although it was "too early" for e-commerce in North Korea, the network had already started a commercial and trading information service, Xinhua quoted Mr Li as saying.
Li told Xinhua 50 North Korean technicians began building the system in 1996 and developed the software for the system without outside help.
Foreign diplomats with experience in the North Korean capital - a city plagued by power shortages and extremely limited telephone connections - said they were aware of such a network but had not actually seen it.
One diplomat said the users were "very selective - the inner circle only" and that accessing the Internet from Pyongyang required costly overseas calls or other arrangements.
The Paris-based press freedom group Reporters Sans Frontiers (RSF) (Reporters Without Borders) named North Korea, China and Saudia Arabia as the world's worst Internet censorship offenders.
"North Korea has decided: no servers, no connections. President Kim Jong-il's country is the only one in the world where the Internet does not exist," RSF said in its annual "Enemies of the Internet" report issued this month.
RSF said a few of the North Korean elite with rare access to international telephone lines could log on to the Internet, and that Kim had asked then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright for her e-mail address when she visited Pyongyang last October.