Thirty-Six Digital Firsts of of Korea
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Thirty-Six ‘World Firsts’ of the Republic of Korea:
South Korea as the Emerald City of Digital Development, a List and Timeline, 1995-2022
Appendix One of an upcoming book on South Korea.
By Mark Whitaker:
"Mobile ICT Networks are a big national, global, and cultural change. Arguably, South Korea became the world’s first “saturated” mobile infrastructure and culture when thinking holistically about these thirty-six points, from 1995 to the present.
1. In 1995, Joongang Ilbo (Joongang Newspaper) developed the first internet news website in Asia.
2. 1995: South Korea was the first country in the world to commercialize ‘code division multiplex access’ (CDMA) technology to achieve the first nationwide background potential for broadband-capable mobile phones, as well as conceiving this as a technology for export potential later.
3. 1995-2002; 2002-2008: Korea passes the Telecommunications Business Act, the first Internet censorship law in the world. It continued a government of very tight information and cultural control in South Korea from the days of President’s Park’s National Security Law (that continues) and Chun’s Basic Press Law (revoked in 1987 in modern Korean democratization). The Korea Internet Communications Ethics Committee (ICEC) was tasked to monitor the whole Korean Internet and make recommendations for content removal. By August 1996, the ICEC had censored about 220,000 messages on Korean Internet websites. After 2002, a revised law added more internet policing of content and allowing the removal of websites entirely. By 2008, a complaint would at this point allow the updated Korean Communication Standards Commission (KCSC) to suspend any web posting or article for 30 days as soon as a complaint was filed.
4. In 1996, the Korean video game company Nexus released the world’s first MMORPG—massively multiplayer online role-playing game—called The Kingdom of the Winds, based on a graphic novel about ancient Korea. The USA did release similar games at the same time. (Hong, 2014, p. 213)
5. 1999: By this year, South Korea was the first nation to have more mobile phones than fixed telephones. This was three years before China and four years before the USA. (Larson and Oh, 2011, p. 92)
6. 1999: South Korea had another world first in the area of social network services, thanks to its earlier high speed broadband networks, and a culture founded on ‘connectionism’ that means keeping updated with activities in one’s networks. The first major nationwide social media service in the world was SK Telecom’s Cyworld, launched in this year. Facebook was founded four years later. As late as 2008, near half of South Korea and 90% of youth into their 20s, used Cyworld. Businesses, governments, and universities had Cyworld pages as well. (Oh and Larson, 2011, p. 155) Cyworld was a kind of substitutionary way to program in hypertext as well, with its ‘minihomepy’ that provided various digital virtual purchases with its own online coin the ‘dotori’ (Korean for ‘acorn,’ with each digital coin costing about 100 won, or around 10 U.S. cents) to ‘furnish’ a website as an online home for the user with visual elements. Cyworld’s income stream soon came from mostly virtual purchases using dotori for the ‘minihomepy’, perhaps a world first for any company to have the majority of its profits from simply virtual items sold. Cyworld in Korea began to decline from 2009 with the entry of Facebook into the Korean market, as well as Cyworld’s lack of mobile phone accessibilities, and even massive data leakages from Cyworld/Nate hacking from 2011.
7. 1999-2015: South Korea was the first and the only state ever mandating its citizens and consumers use a single nationwide and nationally-exclusive digital authentication, NPKI, in all online transactions that gave the Korean state a record of all private financial transactions of all citizens online. It failed in its ultimate purpose: South Korea became the second most hacked country in the world. (Son, 2019; Son and Whitaker, 2022). Self-defeating NPKI mandates were slowly withdrawn after 2015, yet technological path dependence remains.
8. 2000 to present: The world’s first World Cyber Games started. It remains an international e-sports competition of countries’ best digital game players, competing against each other in online video games. Originally created by Oh Yoonseop, the Korean CEO of International Cyber Marketing, it was financially supported by Samsung. The first event was in October 7-15, 2000, was called the “World Cyber Game Challenge,” and was sponsored by the Korean Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the Korean Ministry of Information and Communications, and Samsung as well. Seventeen countries competed for similar gold, silver, and bronze medals. In the first WCG 2000, there were only 174 competitors within 17 countries that formed the first round to find the best national players who came to South Korea to play each other. The prize pool was originally $20,000. Next, on December 5-9, 2001, the World Cyber Games held a larger world event in Seoul, Korea, with a total purse prize of $300,000 to attract global players to Korea. In 2001, now 24 countries participated with fully 430 players in the final tournament in Seoul with an astounding 389,000 players worldwide though participating in the national preliminaries. By 2002, it was held in Korea once more with a prize pool of US $1,300,000. In 2002, approximately 450,000 preliminary players worldwide played to find the 450 final tournament players. Next, the 2003 tournament had a total prize pool of US $2,000,000, and was the first to feature console based competition as well. This WCG went around the world after starting in Korea. By 2014, the WCG was closed, due to personal differences of members with leadership. However, in 2017, the Samsung trademark was transferred to Korean publisher Smilegate, which revived the WGC by 2019 with its first event in Xi’an, China on July 18-21, 2019. The WCG competition in 2020 was held online between the two host sites of Shanghai and Seoul, and gained approximately 650 million viewers worldwide.
9. From 2001–2013, Korea’s ICT sector accounted for the highest percentage of value-added products when comparing all OECD countries, followed by Finland, Ireland, Sweden, Japan and the U.S. As of 2013, Korea’s percentage of value added stood at 10.7% compared with only 5–7% for the other leading countries (OECD, 2015). During the same period, Korea, then ranking as first within the top five exporters of ICT products in the world, was the only state economy to increase its share of the world market for such value-added products. (Larson, 2017)
10. 2005: South Korea becomes the first country to introduce mobile TV, or digital multi-media broadcasting (DMB). It used digital radio frequencies to send wireless radio, television, or other data to mobile phones, navigation systems and other mobile devices (Oh and Larson, 2011, p. 101).
11. 2006: The Korean government announced the U-Korea Master Plan, the world’s first “ubiquitous network plan” for a nation, in which persons and objects nationwide would always be digitally connected.
12. 2006: Going cashless earliest, in South Korea the idea of using a mobile phone’s monthly payment for additional other small daily purchases was used by 23 million Koreans by this year, or nearly half the population. Any mobile phone subscribers could pay for online goods with authorization codes via mobile SNS. Thus a mobile phone payment at the end of the month became a credit card monthly payment at the end of the month as well. (Oh and Larson, 2011, p. 153) Mobile operators started to have other general payment options built into hardware, like SK Telecom’s Moneta Service. A mobile phone model could have a Moneta smart card inside it, and that smart card could be linked to a credit card account, and thus charges could be added to a user’s mobile phone bill by ‘swiping’ with touchless purchases at hundreds of thousands of Korean businesses that had dongles on the credit card payment system in the store that could wirelessly interface with Moneta smart cards in mobile phones passed over them. Then, the mobile phone subscriber would be billed at the end of the month for the miscellaneous purchases they made through their mobile phone wireless touch payments. Moneta mobile phone chips started in 2005, and they could be used for online payments of goods as well. Remember, this is before Internet-accessible smartphones are invented from 2006 onward.
13. 2006-2018: From 2006, Korea pioneered the world’s first nationally-installed infrastructure for wireless Internet in its patented “WiBro” infrastructure. It spread around the nation from 2006 yet demonstrated first at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy. It was developed to expand data limitations of (non-Internet) mobile phones then and to add further distances to wireless Internet mobility than was available from wireless Internet-based on telephone wires (ASDL) or from inherently short-range wireless LANs. It was a national infrastructure with WiBro base stations connecting to the WiBro units that had a throughput of 30 to 50 MB/s with a radius of up to 1 to 5 kilometers. As a national infrastructure, it was claimed to provide for fast moving mobility to a wireless Internet connection up to 120km/hr (~75 miles/hr) travelling around the country, moving from WiBro base station to base station, though tests in Busan at the time showed it worked at lower travel speeds than this benchmark. Monthly subscriptions were around US $30/mo. This was before the first wireless flatglass smartphones like the LG Prada in May 2007 or Apple’s iPhone in June 2007. However, in retrospect, because 3G and 4G standards of wireless Internet services would soon outclass it as a standard later, WiBro would in the end only be a standard deployed as a service in Korea from 2006 despite Korea doing the work to make WiBro a globally certified standard under the name mobile WiMAX (IEEE 802.16e), and despite some other nations building out regional WiMAX networks in Italy, Brazil, Venezuela, Croatia, and the U.S. state of Michigan. In Korea, WiBro was allocated the same 2.3-2.4 GHz band as later smartphones. With declining use, Korean WiBro networks were shut down in 2018. If you know what you are looking for, many buildings in Seoul still sport “WiBro” ports in their walls, where you could put your portable WiBro antenna ‘egg’ (it was rounded like an egg) to connect to the WiBro base stations in a major building to broadcast wireless Internet nearby to your other devices.
14. 2006: On December 16th, 2006, Korea announced the world’s first Internet-accessible mobile (feature) phone with a large touchscreen: the “LG Prada” from Korean LG telecommunications created in design collaboration with luxury clothing brand Prada. It went on sale globally in May 2007. The LG Prada smartphone was announced weeks before January 9, 2007—the date when Steve Jobs of Apple announced the first iPhone would be later on sale, with the iPhone of course being another Internet-accessible mobile (true operating system-based) smartphone with a large touchscreen. Thus, the Korean LG Prada was the first smartphone as it was announced earlier and went on sale earlier by May 2007. The iPhone was announced second (on January 9, 2007) and then went on sale second on June 29, 2007.
15. 2007-2020: From 2007 onward, South Korea has the world’s fastest internet bandwidth for thirteen years running (2007 to 2020) for a large country. In 2017, it was 28.6 MB/s; in the same year of 2017, the USA’s average was 18.7 MB/s (Akamai, 2017). By 2020, South Korea’s average fixed internet bandwidth was 156.18MB/s, and its average mobile bandwidth was 81 MB/s (Ookla, 2020).
16. 2007-2012: From 2007, Korea was the first nation to ever have a ‘real name net ID’ requirement from this year, ending online anonymity on major digital platforms. It was removed in 2012 by the Korean Constitutional Court as a danger to democracy among other rationales like the problem of economic damage from hacking and theft of centralized records of tens of millions of Korean’s real names and identification papers.
17. 2009 onward: From 2009, online gaming exports became half of all the nation’s cultural content exports, the first such digital specialization in the world in exports. (Oh and Larson, 2011, p. 173) By 2012, Korea’s largest cultural export was still online video games that brought in 1,200% more revenue than K-pop at the time, and it was then 58% of Korea’s cultural contents industry revenue at around $2.38 billion out of a total then of approximately $4.8 billion. (Hong, 2014)
18. By 2013, South Korea became the world’s first smartphone-saturated youth culture with 97.7% ownership for ages 18-24. (Emarketer, 2013). In 2013, the USA was only 50%.
19. By two years later, in 2015, a 100% smartphone penetration extended beyond youth culture into young adults through age 35, another world first in saturation (PEW, 2015). [Korea #3 in social media use at 87% by 2019.]
20. From 2015 to 2019, South Korea ranked #1 in the world on cheap citizen data transparency; in 2015, it was #1 in OECD; in 2019, it was #1 in OECD (‘OURdata Index’, “open-useful-reusable data” index, from OECD Government at a Glance, 2019)
21. By 2015, Korea was the world’s biggest manufacturer of platforms of free MMORPGs in the world, in which other pieces of the game accessories for your character are value-added and cost money. (Hong, 2014, p. 214) Plus, only South Korean companies make it easy to play these Korean MMORPGs all over the world by placing servers in many different countries for it. US game manufactures generally refuse to do this with thus innately slower play outside of the United States.
22. By 2016, 88% of Korean adults owned a smartphone, then the highest percentage in the world (Pew Research Center; Poushter, 2016).
23. From 2016 to 2019, South Korea was #1 in density of AI robots working alongside human laborers, with on average 631 AI robots per 10,000 laborers. The second highest was Singapore with much less (488/10,000), then Germany (309/10,000), and then Japan (303/10,000). (Statista, 2016) By 2017, South Korea was still #1 with an even higher density of 710/10,000. By 2019, South Korean was still #1 with an even higher density of 855/10,000. By 2019, South Korea was #1 with more than double the ratio of AI robots in manufacturing compared to the #2 Japan (364/10,000) or the #3 Germany (346/10,000). (Statista; International Federation of Robotics, 2019)
24. By 2017, another Internet access saturation plateau was reached as nearly 100% of Korean households had internet access, another world first, breaking its own previous world record of 94% in 2015 (PEW, 2015; Ramirez, 2017).
25. South Korea at one point had the cheapest bandwidth cost in the entire OECD. (OECD data) This is no longer true though.
26. By 2017, Korea had the world’s highest 4G LTE penetration of 96%. (The Korea Bizwire, 2017)
27. By 2017, South Korea was #1 in the world with the highest per capita users in m-commerce (mobile e-commerce) (Hootsuite/WeAreSocial); [By 2017, Korea was #2 in world for highest per capita e-commerce, in general.
28. By 2017, South Korea was #1 in world for netizen internet news consumption, i.e., was the highest per capita use of internet portal sites for news consumption (77%), far higher than the average of 30% of a total of 36 surveyed countries (Y. Kim, Kim, & Kim, 2017).
29. 2018: The United Nations ranked South Korea as tied for #1 among 193 countries’ online participation sector. [South Korea then ranked #3 in the world in the e-government development category. (riss.kr)]
30. April 2019: South Korea deployed the world’s first 5G networks, hours ahead of the USA. (TechJuice, 2019)
31. South Korea has the first nationwide, parallel, dedicated emergency services LTE network, “FirstNet.”
32. 2019: South Korea ranked #1 in world on state spending for research and development as a percentage of GNP. Israel and South Korea are the only two states spending so much per capita; South Korea overtakes Israel for the first time in 2019. (Israel #1 again, in 2020.) (Bloomberg Innovation Index, 2020)
33. 2014-21: South Korea ranked #1 in the world on innovation for seven out of nine years. (Jamrisko & Lu, 2020; Jamrisko, Lu and Tanzi, 2021; Bloomberg Innovation Index, 2021). Israel ranked lower at #10 or #7, respectively, despite spending similarly per capita to South Korea. The USA’s rank in this period was never above #8, despite having Silicon Valley. In 2020, Korea falls to #2 below Germany—yet only by a miniscule 0.05 in the index. By 2021, Korea back to #1, Germany to #4 and USA drops out of the top 10.
34. 2020: South Korea was the #1 cashless society among 46 countries’ markets with 77% of its citizens/consumers preferring to pay without cash, i.e., preferring to use digital payments of various forms (Statista, 2020; Global Web Index via Datareportal)
35. 2020 onward: In Korea, the development of artificial intelligence as a leading sector is in the entertainment sector of the Korean Wave. It is globally odd for entertainment to absorb AI innovation. When judged by the whole world’s investments, entertainment is not even in the top nine global industries expected to use AI applications (which are healthcare, automotive, financial services, transportation, technology, media communications, retail and consumer, energy, and manufacturing). This is another ‘world first’ of Korea to apply AI to its entertainment sector. It has a lot to do with the starving of typical AI funding cycles because of point #7 above.
36. On July 6, 2021, for another world first, the status of South Korea was changed to a ‘developed country’ group at the 68th United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). This makes South Korea the first and only case so far of a status change from a developing country to a developed country since the establishment of UNCTAD in 1964.