Web 2.0 Asia

Sorry about the recent slow posting - Yes I've been terribly busy, but it is also rather difficult to blog when the sweeping story in the nation's web industry involves your own employer. I'm talking about the news that YouTube is not following Korean government's real name verification requirement and instead blocking content upload on Korea country site. (Also picked up by Asiajin)

On the heels of the Youtube news comes another news on Korean government's Big Brother moves: Minerva, a blogger who criticized the government's sloppy economic policies and later got indicted in January, has been sentenced 18 months in jail yesterday. The charges on him: Spreading false financial rumors on the internet, thereby undermining the government's leadership. (Many of his "predictions" turned out to be right, including the fall of Lehman Brothers, by the way.)

I'm not saying this in defense of the Korean government, but it's not like Korea is being the only country in the world whose government is trying to exert more control over the netizens' freedom of speech. Iranian government reportedly tortured and killed a political blogger; Indian government wants all Indian nationals to use .in email addresses, not .com ones; Chinese government censored certain search results, a policy to which even Google had complied. 

Maybe I shouldn't reiterate what would be pretty obvious to the readers of this blog, but the key misunderstanding these government officials have is that the same policies in the real world can be applied to the web world. But as a web service professional, I can attest it's not the case -- country border doesn't mean much on the internet, and the only meaningful diving line for an internet service is language. 

I'm not saying this from a public policy or academic standpoint; I'm saying this from a very practical perspective. For Spanish-speaking audience living in California, language preference (Spanish) carries far more importance than country settings (US). An American expat living in Japan would want to be able to access Hulu and consume content in there, but would be frustrated to find that he's unable to access the site because his IP address shows he's in Japan and the site (falsely) assumes he's a Japanese. 

Obviously there are still some road blocks, such as payment system or other country-specific factors, that require web services to implement country lenses. But the web will eventually evolve into a truly global medium, if it's not one already. When that time comes, country selection may become meaningless and obsolete, and governments won't be able to easily put forth proprietary internet policies that are relevant only to a specific country. Users will still have to specify their language preference, either explicitly or implicitly through browser's default locale -- of course, that's until Google perfects its translation engine and lifts the last-standing barrier of the internet.