http://www.i972.net/~gen/kr.php

Hope it helps.

To their merit, almost all ISPs have an English support hotline if you can read enough Korean to find it. A couple of sites have also noticeably improved their friendliness to Mac as well.

I agree that it’s a classic case of uneven development, but I think it’s indicative of the nation’s growth in general. Perhaps more attached to a collective state of mind than we would normally associate these issues.

In response to Micah, I do think that a lot of Korean websites have attempted to accomodate non-citizen users recently as I notice many of them now have an option to sign up as a non-Korean (some have both a ‘overseas Korean’ option and a ‘foreigner’ option). Whether this has been the result of a public debate I’m not sure – I would guess that they’ve just had loads of people e-mailing them from the US wondering why they can’t use their services.

Btw I saw some Firefox extension the other day from Taiwan that allows you to open an IE tab within Firefox. Perhaps that’s the solution to all FF-hating Korean sites.

But I’m often amazed at the ‘unusability’ of many big official websites in Korea (such as the academic and history-related ones I look at a lot) which generally have a mindnumbing visual assault of links and sections all up there on the index page. Then of course there’s the whole ‘only works in IE’ thing, which seems ironic to me considering Korea’s previous plucky battles with Microsoft over wordprocessors. And the fact that Korea doesn’t seem to be doing anything on the international stage in terms of web 2.0 services (although perhaps that’s not such a bad thing if the whole bubble comes crashing down sometime soon). Nor have I heard much about the development of Korean open source products, although may be my own ignorance.

Adding all this stuff together the Korean internet seems like a classic case of uneven development: very advanced in some areas, backward in others and riddled with contradictions.

As a fellow Mac user, I really sympathize with the problems you’ve experienced using the Korean internet. I read somewhere that iPods have taken off in Korea too, but I guess that that their popularity hasn’t translated into increased Mac sales. In any case, the lack of Korean software for Mac really seems to be fatal — I don’t think that Area Hangul has yet been ported to OS X, and I pessimistically imagine that it probably never will be. It’s perfectly possible to input Korean text with Word etc., but it doesn’t even have Korean spell-check…

To return to the issue of internet access: does anybody know if there has been any public debate in Korea regarding the effects of the 2001 law requiring the use of resident identification numbers on the use of the Korean internet by non-nationals? In other words, has there been any public recognition of the fact that not everybody who wants to use Korean sites is a citizen of South Korea? When you consider the sheer numbers of non-citizen ethnic Koreans around the world, you’d think that somebody would have already pointed this out …