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Unsurprisingly, terrible Korean internet strikes again. ISPs try to charge companies insane fees because customers want to connect to their servers. Company dec

Unsurprisingly, terrible Korean internet strikes again. ISPs try to charge companies insane fees because customers want to connect to their servers. Company decides to use peer-ro-peer instead so the ISP starts installing spyware on customer computers. Makes me wonder where this myth of "good Korean internet" even came from if everything ends up so bandwidth constrained. Is it because all the customers and services are in the same city so it appears low latency? I hope everyone involved in this catches criminal charges, all the way up the chain. Completely unacceptable behavior.

nayuki 2y ago
Another memory from the terrible South Korean Internet is how the national banks required customers to log in using Internet Explorer because of mandatory ActiveX blobs of code.
- TheRoque 2y ago
  They have such weird constraints. Even Coupang Play refuses to load their video when I'm on Linux, which makes no sense at all.
- lifthrasiir 2y ago
  It makes me sad that all of these started with US's restriction on the export of cryptography, which prompted South Korea (among others) to develop a domestic algorithm that was unsupported by contemporary browsers at that time.
  - quanto 2y ago
    The US export restriction applied to other countries as well. The question is what has made Korean internet uniquely bad.
    - lifthrasiir 2y ago
      I think the answer itself is clear to me: SK bit the bullet much earlier than most other countries, having implemented a nationwide ADSL infrastructure by circa 2000. The same thing happened to Japan for example, where early mobile services were so successful that they essentially stagnated further development until SoftBank's introduction of iPhone.
    - rfoo 2y ago
      It wasn't unique to Korean. 15-20 years ago Chinese banking website did exactly same things. Maybe they got the idea from SK, don't know. It only ended with widespread adoption of mobile phones and Chrome.
    - seoulmetro 2y ago
      One guy who developed and marketed and then lobbied a single solution that aged extremely poorly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahn_Cheol-soo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahn_Cheol-soo
    - makeitdouble 2y ago
      One answer is internet banking being way more cumbersome and less advanced in other countries. At that time spending time on the phone or have the customer come spend a miserable time at the agency was the prefered way from the bank's perspective. To this day many banks won't allow all operations from the online interface.
    - citrin_ru 2y ago
      Active-X was AFIK a common requirement for banking e.t.c. during crypto export restrictions but once they where lifted almost everyone switched to https. What different about SK is the laws which keep their IT security in the past.
- tonetegeatinst 2y ago
  Can I get a link to a few of those sites? I want to see what happens when I visit using Firefox and tor browser.
lifthrasiir 2y ago
> Makes me wonder where this myth of "good Korean internet" even came from if everything ends up so bandwidth constrained. It is not a myth! A decade ago, though. I would still consider it is "good" in terms of objective metrics, but other countries have since caught up. > Is it because all the customers and services are in the same city so it appears low latency? No, because it would only apply to a quarter of the entire population of South Korea if it were true.
yongjik 2y ago
South Korea at least used to have blazingly fast internet infrastructure. Of course that didn't make up for shitty banking websites that you could only use by running Internet Explorer and allowing it to install "security plugins" that hook into Windows kernel, but at least the internet was fast, and it did give Korea an edge for its IT industry. That was, I think, about twenty years ago. I've been living in the US for 10+ years so I'm not very well informed, but basically the ISP industry ended up in an oligopoly where everybody's friends with the government, and they kept raising prices while neglecting infra upgrade. Until nobody can call Korea's internet "fast" any more. Now all we've got is shitty websites. (To be fair, they are somewhat less shitty now... you can now access your banking websites on Mac!)
- xenospn 2y ago
  I remember visiting SK back in 2005-6, and the only way to get online was to install an IE plugin.
  - VygmraMGVl 2y ago
    This was true in 2013 as well. I've heard this has changed in the last 5 years or so, though.
  - localfirst 2y ago
    In early 2000s I used those Korean SIN number generators to access mmorpgs I stopped when my cousin told me it was illegal Have a lot of fond memories when there was a mini mmorpg bubble in korea N-age still going strong it seems in 2024 ! So many rare unique korean mmorpg that will never see the light of the day!
    - iforgotpassword 2y ago
      I actually played one of those Korean mmorpgs that that an English version available ~2005 and I remember their website being a mess. It got wildly popular in the west to a point where the server started lagging and was down frequently, so they set up a second one. Then the cheating got out of hand so they added some anti-cheat software, and shortly after they wanted people to verify their identity by sending a scan of their id/passport. This is when 99% of players left.
ryandrake 2y ago
> According to the news report, KT said it directly planted the malware on its customers that use Webhard’s Grid Service, as it was a malicious program and that “it had no choice but to control it.” Looks like the major ISP and some cloud service provider are having some kind of ridiculous fight, and they're using their customers' computers as the battlefield. I'd be pretty disgusted if I were a customer.
- petre 2y ago
  They should be dusgusted. KT's market share something like 80% of landline subscribers and 45% of high speed Internet usets. This is Korea's equivalent of AT&T. The National Pension Service owns ~13% of it.
bee_rider 2y ago
I imagine keeping at the front of the pack on any infrastructure investment is very difficult. I mean, it’s an investment, you want to give it time to amortize, right?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
NL807 2y ago
How is this not criminal?
- OsrsNeedsf2P 2y ago
  It is criminal. From the article, 13 KT employees and contractors were charged.
godelski 2y ago
It's also worth noting the SK has some pretty terrible laws around the internet in general. Distribution of porn is illegal there and they do their best to block it from outside. They are pretty big on cyber defamation and will go after people who make fun of government officials[0]. They have a comparatively low internet freedom score because they do things like fine middle schoolers for having anti-government websites and the president pursues legal action against YouTubers[1]. It's pretty interesting when coming from the west where all the problems are often spoken about in the open. I mean the great American past time is complaining about the government. But in SK there's a lot more trust of the government and similarly, a lot more control by them. And it is a fairly tight knit group and there's only a few companies that dominate the country. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/13/world/asia/critics-see-south-korea-internet-curbs-as-censorship.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/13/world/asia/critics-see-so... [1] https://freedomhouse.org/country/south-korea/freedom-net/2023 https://freedomhouse.org/country/south-korea/freedom-net/202...
- AtlasBarfed 2y ago
  It's a lot easier to buy into a government when the most horrid example of one in modern history (arguable, I get it) is only 100 miles to the north with a huge amount of artillery pointed at you.
  - godelski 2y ago
    Not to mention when you were also very recently occupied by a neighboring country. And an extremely brutal occupation at that. I mean there's still a handful of women still alive who were sex slaves, it wasn't that long ago. Korea really has had it tough, but I wish that would be a drive for more freedom, not less.
  - somenameforme 2y ago
    South Korea has a far crazier history [1] than I think most realize. This [2] is the first president of South Korea, installed by the US, and then eventually ferried off into exile in Hawaii by the US after a revolution, leading the 2nd Republic of Korea. That was followed by coups and all other sorts of great things, including 4 acting presidents that did not serve more than 50 days a piece, eventually leading to the 3rd Republic of Korea which was another dictatorship who then had his dictatorial powers codified in the 4th republic. Then he was assassinated and you get the the 5th republic where the dictator's friend was put in power. Then you get the 6th republic in 1987 (!!) and that's the South Korea we're somewhat more familiar with. Even in modern times, I think most don't realize how wacky Korean politics has been. For instance the president from 2013-2017 (Park Geun-hye, daughter of a former dictator) was involved in some sort of weird cult-like grooming controversy where she was being groomed and controlled by what some media called a 'Korean Rasputin.' She was eventually impeached and imprisoned for corruption/abuse of power, and is now serving decades in prison. And it seems the current president of South Korea has an approval rating in the 30s. So I have no idea how Koreans view their government, but it's really unlike anything I think that we can compare elsewhere. But I suspect "trust" and "integrity" are not the sort of words that'd be on top. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_South_Korea# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_South_Korea# [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngman_Rhee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngman_Rhee
seoulmetro 2y ago
>Is it because all the customers and services are in the same city so it appears low latency? Yes. It's because the internet of Korea is so well done between nearly all areas of the country with great speeds. But it's true that Korean internet is super fast only within Korea, but the borders are also normal fast borders to other countries so they're just as fast as say a 1gbps connection in Australia. Good Korean internet is not a myth, they had fibre everywhere by the time rich people in the US or Europe were getting it. Korean internet is good, it's just that their ISPs are also fairly evil like the rest of the world, but they have less freedom constraining their evils.
- iforgotpassword 2y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40806633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40806633 As said, it was good/impressive 20 years ago, now it's just what everyone else has. And SK software is a joke, like the linked post elaborates. I don't know if it changed during the last 5 years, but when I was there I wanted to use Google maps for navigation and it looked like shit, so after some digging around I found because apparently there are some SK patents that prevent Google from using a lot of modern tech. So no wonder SK people compare that to naver and think their IT tech is top notch, but if you compare it to the "real Google", it's a joke. It's the same in China actually, but there you simply can't access the western counterparts at all usually.
  - seoulmetro 2y ago
    The local variants of map apps are leaps and bounds ahead of Google Maps at any point in the last 10 years though. And that's not due to Google being restricted. Google is free to do what it wants in Australia, but it still sucks pretty bad. But yeah, SK software got sabotaged by people in power unfortunately. But the software also has some high standards from locals it has to live up to. So it's stuck in a situation where the app is quite neat, but it will be as stubborn as a mule if it needs anything to spec.
mrtksn 2y ago
Wow, are they trying to have worse internet than DPRK? Funny how both spectrums of fully controlled market and fully free market can be terrible. Apparently what they did was a crime but it shows the spirit, they though at least that they can do it and get away with it.
pezezin 2y ago
> Makes me wonder where this myth of "good Korean internet" even came from if everything ends up so bandwidth constrained. Is it because all the customers and services are in the same city so it appears low latency? Same here in Japan. The funny thing is that both me here and my parents back in Spain have gigabit fibre, yet my parents' connection is much faster than mine.
monkfish328 2y ago
Wow I've always heard that South Korean internet is supposed to be one of the fastest in the world? How did that go wrong?
- h4kor 2y ago
  Policy failure. South Korea enforced a "Sender Pays" rule for networks, eliminating peering between ISPs. This resulted in companies moving there server to neighboring countries to avoid paying for traffic, which was free before. More details: https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/internet-fragmentation/south-korea-sender-pays/ https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/internet-fragmenta...

nayuki 2y ago

Another memory from the terrible South Korean Internet is how the national banks required customers to log in using Internet Explorer because of mandatory ActiveX blobs of code.

TheRoque 2y ago
They have such weird constraints. Even Coupang Play refuses to load their video when I'm on Linux, which makes no sense at all.
lifthrasiir 2y ago
It makes me sad that all of these started with US's restriction on the export of cryptography, which prompted South Korea (among others) to develop a domestic algorithm that was unsupported by contemporary browsers at that time.
- quanto 2y ago
  The US export restriction applied to other countries as well. The question is what has made Korean internet uniquely bad.
  - lifthrasiir 2y ago
    I think the answer itself is clear to me: SK bit the bullet much earlier than most other countries, having implemented a nationwide ADSL infrastructure by circa 2000. The same thing happened to Japan for example, where early mobile services were so successful that they essentially stagnated further development until SoftBank's introduction of iPhone.
  - rfoo 2y ago
    It wasn't unique to Korean. 15-20 years ago Chinese banking website did exactly same things. Maybe they got the idea from SK, don't know. It only ended with widespread adoption of mobile phones and Chrome.
  - seoulmetro 2y ago
    One guy who developed and marketed and then lobbied a single solution that aged extremely poorly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahn_Cheol-soo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahn_Cheol-soo
  - makeitdouble 2y ago
    One answer is internet banking being way more cumbersome and less advanced in other countries. At that time spending time on the phone or have the customer come spend a miserable time at the agency was the prefered way from the bank's perspective. To this day many banks won't allow all operations from the online interface.
  - citrin_ru 2y ago
    Active-X was AFIK a common requirement for banking e.t.c. during crypto export restrictions but once they where lifted almost everyone switched to https. What different about SK is the laws which keep their IT security in the past.
tonetegeatinst 2y ago
Can I get a link to a few of those sites? I want to see what happens when I visit using Firefox and tor browser.

lifthrasiir 2y ago

> Makes me wonder where this myth of "good Korean internet" even came from if everything ends up so bandwidth constrained. It is not a myth! A decade ago, though. I would still consider it is "good" in terms of objective metrics, but other countries have since caught up. > Is it because all the customers and services are in the same city so it appears low latency? No, because it would only apply to a quarter of the entire population of South Korea if it were true.

yongjik 2y ago

South Korea at least used to have blazingly fast internet infrastructure. Of course that didn't make up for shitty banking websites that you could only use by running Internet Explorer and allowing it to install "security plugins" that hook into Windows kernel, but at least the internet was fast, and it did give Korea an edge for its IT industry. That was, I think, about twenty years ago. I've been living in the US for 10+ years so I'm not very well informed, but basically the ISP industry ended up in an oligopoly where everybody's friends with the government, and they kept raising prices while neglecting infra upgrade. Until nobody can call Korea's internet "fast" any more. Now all we've got is shitty websites. (To be fair, they are somewhat less shitty now... you can now access your banking websites on Mac!)

xenospn 2y ago
I remember visiting SK back in 2005-6, and the only way to get online was to install an IE plugin.
- VygmraMGVl 2y ago
  This was true in 2013 as well. I've heard this has changed in the last 5 years or so, though.
- localfirst 2y ago
  In early 2000s I used those Korean SIN number generators to access mmorpgs I stopped when my cousin told me it was illegal Have a lot of fond memories when there was a mini mmorpg bubble in korea N-age still going strong it seems in 2024 ! So many rare unique korean mmorpg that will never see the light of the day!
  - iforgotpassword 2y ago
    I actually played one of those Korean mmorpgs that that an English version available ~2005 and I remember their website being a mess. It got wildly popular in the west to a point where the server started lagging and was down frequently, so they set up a second one. Then the cheating got out of hand so they added some anti-cheat software, and shortly after they wanted people to verify their identity by sending a scan of their id/passport. This is when 99% of players left.

ryandrake 2y ago

> According to the news report, KT said it directly planted the malware on its customers that use Webhard’s Grid Service, as it was a malicious program and that “it had no choice but to control it.” Looks like the major ISP and some cloud service provider are having some kind of ridiculous fight, and they're using their customers' computers as the battlefield. I'd be pretty disgusted if I were a customer.

petre 2y ago
They should be dusgusted. KT's market share something like 80% of landline subscribers and 45% of high speed Internet usets. This is Korea's equivalent of AT&T. The National Pension Service owns ~13% of it.

bee_rider 2y ago

I imagine keeping at the front of the pack on any infrastructure investment is very difficult. I mean, it’s an investment, you want to give it time to amortize, right?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

NL807 2y ago

How is this not criminal?

OsrsNeedsf2P 2y ago
It is criminal. From the article, 13 KT employees and contractors were charged.

godelski 2y ago

It's also worth noting the SK has some pretty terrible laws around the internet in general. Distribution of porn is illegal there and they do their best to block it from outside. They are pretty big on cyber defamation and will go after people who make fun of government officials[0]. They have a comparatively low internet freedom score because they do things like fine middle schoolers for having anti-government websites and the president pursues legal action against YouTubers[1]. It's pretty interesting when coming from the west where all the problems are often spoken about in the open. I mean the great American past time is complaining about the government. But in SK there's a lot more trust of the government and similarly, a lot more control by them. And it is a fairly tight knit group and there's only a few companies that dominate the country. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/13/world/asia/critics-see-south-korea-internet-curbs-as-censorship.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/13/world/asia/critics-see-so... [1] https://freedomhouse.org/country/south-korea/freedom-net/2023 https://freedomhouse.org/country/south-korea/freedom-net/202...

AtlasBarfed 2y ago
It's a lot easier to buy into a government when the most horrid example of one in modern history (arguable, I get it) is only 100 miles to the north with a huge amount of artillery pointed at you.
- godelski 2y ago
  Not to mention when you were also very recently occupied by a neighboring country. And an extremely brutal occupation at that. I mean there's still a handful of women still alive who were sex slaves, it wasn't that long ago. Korea really has had it tough, but I wish that would be a drive for more freedom, not less.
- somenameforme 2y ago
  South Korea has a far crazier history [1] than I think most realize. This [2] is the first president of South Korea, installed by the US, and then eventually ferried off into exile in Hawaii by the US after a revolution, leading the 2nd Republic of Korea. That was followed by coups and all other sorts of great things, including 4 acting presidents that did not serve more than 50 days a piece, eventually leading to the 3rd Republic of Korea which was another dictatorship who then had his dictatorial powers codified in the 4th republic. Then he was assassinated and you get the the 5th republic where the dictator's friend was put in power. Then you get the 6th republic in 1987 (!!) and that's the South Korea we're somewhat more familiar with. Even in modern times, I think most don't realize how wacky Korean politics has been. For instance the president from 2013-2017 (Park Geun-hye, daughter of a former dictator) was involved in some sort of weird cult-like grooming controversy where she was being groomed and controlled by what some media called a 'Korean Rasputin.' She was eventually impeached and imprisoned for corruption/abuse of power, and is now serving decades in prison. And it seems the current president of South Korea has an approval rating in the 30s. So I have no idea how Koreans view their government, but it's really unlike anything I think that we can compare elsewhere. But I suspect "trust" and "integrity" are not the sort of words that'd be on top. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_South_Korea# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_South_Korea# [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngman_Rhee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngman_Rhee

seoulmetro 2y ago

>Is it because all the customers and services are in the same city so it appears low latency? Yes. It's because the internet of Korea is so well done between nearly all areas of the country with great speeds. But it's true that Korean internet is super fast only within Korea, but the borders are also normal fast borders to other countries so they're just as fast as say a 1gbps connection in Australia. Good Korean internet is not a myth, they had fibre everywhere by the time rich people in the US or Europe were getting it. Korean internet is good, it's just that their ISPs are also fairly evil like the rest of the world, but they have less freedom constraining their evils.

iforgotpassword 2y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40806633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40806633 As said, it was good/impressive 20 years ago, now it's just what everyone else has. And SK software is a joke, like the linked post elaborates. I don't know if it changed during the last 5 years, but when I was there I wanted to use Google maps for navigation and it looked like shit, so after some digging around I found because apparently there are some SK patents that prevent Google from using a lot of modern tech. So no wonder SK people compare that to naver and think their IT tech is top notch, but if you compare it to the "real Google", it's a joke. It's the same in China actually, but there you simply can't access the western counterparts at all usually.
- seoulmetro 2y ago
  The local variants of map apps are leaps and bounds ahead of Google Maps at any point in the last 10 years though. And that's not due to Google being restricted. Google is free to do what it wants in Australia, but it still sucks pretty bad. But yeah, SK software got sabotaged by people in power unfortunately. But the software also has some high standards from locals it has to live up to. So it's stuck in a situation where the app is quite neat, but it will be as stubborn as a mule if it needs anything to spec.

mrtksn 2y ago

Wow, are they trying to have worse internet than DPRK? Funny how both spectrums of fully controlled market and fully free market can be terrible. Apparently what they did was a crime but it shows the spirit, they though at least that they can do it and get away with it.

pezezin 2y ago

> Makes me wonder where this myth of "good Korean internet" even came from if everything ends up so bandwidth constrained. Is it because all the customers and services are in the same city so it appears low latency? Same here in Japan. The funny thing is that both me here and my parents back in Spain have gigabit fibre, yet my parents' connection is much faster than mine.

monkfish328 2y ago

Wow I've always heard that South Korean internet is supposed to be one of the fastest in the world? How did that go wrong?

h4kor 2y ago
Policy failure. South Korea enforced a "Sender Pays" rule for networks, eliminating peering between ISPs. This resulted in companies moving there server to neighboring countries to avoid paying for traffic, which was free before. More details: https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/internet-fragmentation/south-korea-sender-pays/ https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/internet-fragmenta...