Windows Vistas is more expensive in Korea. And I'm not surprised.
Now, I'm no defender of Microsoft, but the complaints about the higher price here or the fact most Korean banking sites won't run on it begs the question: "Umm, whose fault is that, though?"
The Digital Chosun Ilbo says that the new system "doesn't play well with Active-X" on Korean sites. Bullshit. The Korean government decided to ignore international standardization efforts back in 1998 because it had to 빨리빨리 everything. Gotta have it now, can't wait, can't wait. Now that the world, having been on one standard, has moved in a different direction, Korea suddenly finds itself sitting high and dry. And now, Korean sites don't play well with the rest of the planet.
And guess who pays for that?
Yes, Korean users and the business sector are paying the price, while the Ministry of Information and Communication, along with the short-term memory enabled by the media, tries to pass it off as somebody else's fault. Now, many Korean non-expert users are starting to get that 대학교 2학년 sense of the-big-plot-to-victimize-Korea, but as is often the case when you look at the history of the situation, the only people who got Koreans into this are Koreans themselves, namely through the MoIC.
Here's the relevant article on the situation, which chronicles how the Korean market basically fucked itself with its computer "monoculture" and short-sightedness.
The history goes back to 1998, when the 128 bit SSL protocol was still not finalized (it was finalized by the IETF as RFC 2246 in Jan. '99.) South Korean legislation did not allow 40 bit encryption for online transactions (and Bill Clinton did not allow for the export of 128 bit encryption until December 1999) and the demand for 128 bit encryption was so great that the South Korean government funded (via the Korean Information Security Agency) a block cipher called SEED. SEED is, of course, used nowhere else except South Korea, because every other nation waited for the 128 bit SSL protocol to be finalized (and exported from the US) and have standardized on that.
In the early years of SEED, users downloaded the SEED plugin to their IE or Netscape browsers, either an Active X control or a NSplugin, which was then tied to a certificate issued by a Korean government certificate authority. (Can you see where this is going?) When Netscape lost the browser war, the NSplugin fell out of use and for years, S. Korean users have only had an Active X control with the SEED cipher to do their online banking or commerce or government.
So we end up in 2007, 9 years after SEED was created for Korean users, and one legacy of the fall of Netscape is that Korean computer/Internet users only have an Active X control to do any encrypted communication online. So in late 2006, a group of Korean computer/Internet users, Citizens Action Network at Open Web Korea, having documented the problem with accessibility of sites via anything other than Microsoft IE, have decided to sue the Korean government.
Even if you aren't a tech wonk, that article – "The Cost of Monoculture" – is a must-read.
And for those of you waiting for an Apple iPhone, don't expect to see it anytime soon, and that's not just because of the issue of the CDMA standard. Here were Brendon Carr's words on the matter (which were originally a comment in the Marmot's post on the subject, "No iPhone for Korea"):
There is another wrinkle, and that is the Korean government has mandated a “standard” for Korea only — called WIPI (Wireless Platform for Interoperability), a Korean-developed open source solution to the problem of having to pay Qualcomm royalties for BREW. But BREW is already in the market through KTF and comprises about 23% of the local market. Both of these are middle-ware for downloading those crappy ringtones and games to your phone. The Apple iPhone, being a handheld computer running Mac OS X and syncing by direct connect or WiFi, promises a completely different approach to getting content onto the phone. iPhone will probably not need WIPI or BREW — yet the Ministry of Information and Communication requires all phones to have WIPI. To access the Korean market, Apple will have to tailor a special phone with a useless middle-ware layer just for this one country. Big investment, small return. Korea is a rich country and a hot phone market, but it’s not the center of the universe.
And apparently, that's just one part of the problem. From the same thread, but from a comment by "Sperwer" (also not written for this blog, but as part of the Marmot post linked to above):
It won’t be long until Apple comes out with a CDMA version of the phone; GSM has made a lot of inroads in the US, but it’s still predominantly a CDMA market; don’t forget where Qualcomm - the developer of CDMA - comes from. The problem in Korea thus is not just - or even - that it too is a CDMA market - but that, as Brendon points out, there are a host of other government-industry collusively created non-tariff barriers, deliberatley designed as technical issues to try to draw attention away from the blatantly protectionist nature of such barriers. The BREW/WIPI business cited by Brendon is but one example. Another is that although Korea has CDMA phones, the local CDMA hardware implementation is a bit different, so the standard CDMA hardware configuration won’t work in Korea. The effect is to burden foreign mfrs with a disproportionate cost to make Korea compatible phones in order to discourage them from entering the local market (with its boaload of other entry problems) and thus provide local mfrs with a protected platform from which to build and ship standard CDMA compatible phones into world markets that are so large that, given the protectionist advantgae it affords them, the marginal cost to the Korean mfrs of making two models of the same phone is trivial. Anyway, even if Apple comes out with a CDMA version, that don;t necessarily mean you’ll see it here in Korea.
Sound familiar? And you're not gonna read, in a Korean newspaper, about the unfair trade practices that are actually responsible for Korea being able to dominate its own cell phone market, as opposed to the Korean belief that their phones are just "better." Sure, Korean cell phones are great, don't get me wrong, but don't get the notion that it was because they won any battle of fair competition.
And you certainly won't read about it in the Joongang Ilbo, which is owned by Samsung.
It's also sad that a non-Korean blog has their finger on the obvious pulse of the problem much more than any domestic newspaper does. Or maybe they do, but the real story would just be too "embarrassing" to Korea. [rolls eyes]
It's also sad that this blog, written by a non-computer expert and a non-journalist, seems to have a fuller and more accurately contextualized story than any of the English-language press (here's one from the Korea Times). But that's not saying much.
Just as with the FTA, either the Korean market shapes up and adheres to international standards, or it pays for it in the end. Is it Microsoft's fault that Korea was too impatient to wait for international standards to be set for 128-bit encryption and went off and made its own bizarre, Korea-only version?
That's why you have to download all sort of bizarre plugins when you deal with your Internet banking in Korea, because actually, those special plugins had to be written to allow their sites to work with XP.
Now, Korean consumers are learning that OS's such as the ones for Mac aren't the "weird" ones, but are actually left out because:
1) the Mac OS was price-gouged out of any reasonable market share because of the evil, "sick joke" that was the Elex Computer company (may it burn in Hell), which sold Macs here at such an exorbitant markup that it's no wonder Korea consumers still see a Mac and think "I can't afford that."
2) if Korean banking isn't even compatible with Windoze, do you think Korean companies are gonna make web sites compatible with Macs? As if.
I guess Korean consumers are starting to finally pay the price for being the only country in the world to use these bizarre, short-sighted standards, and ignore those of the all other countries on this planet using computers.
Hey, it's their choice. But don't expect Microsoft to foot the bill of customizing their operating system to Korea's because of the previous short-sighted decisions of the MoIC and the rest of the computer industry here.
Yeah. These are, among many other reasons, why the FTA would be painful to Korea in the short-term, but beneficial in the long. Korea isn't Mexico in NAFTA, or Peru in Korea's own FTA with that country. Korea's is the 11th-largest economy on the planet, and it got that way through lopsided trade protection and tariffs.
Nobody's arguing that that was problem while Korea was developing, under military protection of the US (something else that South Korea hasn't had to foot nearly as large a bill over and is still pussyfooting around even as it politically saber-rattles about "operational control") as well as with the huge infusions of economic aid from that country. We won't even get into the aid packages offered by Japan after normalization of trade relations in 1965, because that's just too politically incorrect to be dealt with on this blog. That's because the only elements of Korea-Japan relations worth remembering has been the Imjin War, colonial occupation, and Tokdo. Well, that's all the average Korean undergraduate student knows, anyway.
Oh, and that America's actually responsible for Japanese colonial occupation now, because of the Taft-Katsura agreement. Oooook.
As in other matters, getting a little history and a few facts under the hood of these stories is important, because otherwise one is stuck with believing all's fair in love and trade wars, when if you look at things, it's often pretty not.
Since Korean auto manufacturers now are 3 of the 10 top sellers in the US, yet if you wanted to buy a Ford Taurus in Korea (although I don't know why in the world you'd want to do that, but...), you'd have to pay double the price as in the US, if I were Ford, I'd be crying foul.
Or Samsung monitors, which are everywhere (and have actually been the operational guts of Sony monitors for a long time now).
The only people getting screwed by a lack of FTA are Korean consumers. Why are Koreans paying more than anyone else in the world for beef? Or are constantly smuggling in cheap electronics in their luggage to avoid the 30% VAT? Or is the only country left in the world that still has a thriving black market around food coming in through American military bases? Or pay 3 times the market price for Wild Vines "shitty wine?"
The list could go on. But in the eye of simple, economic common sense, the only people who are "slaves" are Korean consumers, in the thrall of the most unfair price-setting and gouging of the mega-monopolies called Korea chaebeol and other big business interests.
Oh, and farmers, who would also be screwed by opening the gates of trade to American interests. But this isn't just a function of American imperial designs to enslave the Korean nation, but rather the inevitable result of an economy that has been shifting away from the farming, fishing, and forestry sectors because Korea, is an industrializing economy.
Farmers are getting pushed out of the market in the US as well by the economies of scale and production of big agribussiness, which is inevitable, but the solution to that isn't trying to save the farmer, but ease the shifts in the labor market.
One of the reasons so many illegal Mexican immigrants are running over (and back) over the border in the US is because so many of them were pushed out of the farming and small industry sectors in the hundreds of thousands, but of course, instead of making plans to try and account for them in other labor sectors (people have to work and eat, you know), the US just decided to bolster its big electric fence on the border.
That's another issue, but my point is that you're not going to stop the winds of global economic change; what you do is try to ease the effects of those shifts, not fight the inevitable, and in Korea's case, by maintaining clearly unnecessary and unfair trade practices.
And then Koreans wonder why they're paying $700 for new cell phones. Or why Vista won't work with banking sites. Or a Canon camera in Korea is 20-30% more expensive here. Or why Macs were once (back in the 1990's) three times as expensive as in any other country. Or any designer products are insanely marked up over here. Or why Koreans so fervently want to believe that expensive-ass Korean hanwoo beef tastes any different from sweet Montana chuck or Kobe beef. Hey, if I were forced to spend triple to quadruple to price for the same beef, I'd swear I could taste it, too.
The list could seriously go on.
No, Koreans without the FTA are certainly not slaves to big business and chaebeol, while with the FTA, they would be to the US.
This is some pretty good brainwashing the average Korean folks have been subjected to.
Rinse and repeat.
(Informed comments that act as corrections/additions to this post are very, very welcome. Unlike most newspapers here, I'm more concerned with being right than just looking right, which is why I hope this article can be an updated resource.)
