In today’s society, it is almost impossible for us to imagine living in a world with no constant access to the internet. Many of us are so used to looking up almost everything online, that we are not even noticing how large the role is that the World Wide Web plays in our lives. When waking up in the morning, I often quickly look up ‘weather forecast Rotterdam’ before deciding what to wear that day. Before leaving the house, Google Maps will tell me which way is the quickest to where I want to go, and during the day, when working on a university project, I am constantly looking up information on the internet. And maybe most importantly, worldwide news is directly posted onto the internet, which keeps us constantly informed and up to date. These are some features of the internet that many of us make use of practically every day. For almost all the questions or thoughts we have, an internet site exists. This can be explained by the enormous amount of registered domains, over 1 billion worldwide.
When talking about countries that do not have access to the internet in the same matter as we do, thoughts quickly go towards poor countries that are very behind in technological innovations, compared to the Western world that we live in. Last month, it was revealed that North Korea is one of these countries where people have little to no access to the internet. The reason for this being that the government prevents the country from having access to more internet websites.
To be precise, North Korea has exactly 28 registered domains on the top-level domain .kp. On September 19th, by accident, it was suddenly possible for the rest of the world to gain insights into the list of websites that are registered in North Korea. What is apparent about these websites, is that they are mainly directed towards foreign countries, instead of to North Koreans. Besides the extremely limited number of registered websites, only a few percent of the North Koreans have access to a computer at all.
Keeping an entire country away from the internet has an enormous political effect on the country. Knowledge is power, and access to the internet means unlimited access to knowledge. For the North Korean government, this is an important reason to keep a strong control on the internet, as access to all this knowledge would be harmful for the existence of the dictatorship.
In these modern days, I wonder whether a country like North Korea can keep on preventing their inhabitants from making use of everything that the current internet era has to offer. In a world where everything is built around the internet, it is very difficult to keep up with other countries, who have adopted the internet entirely. What would happen in the country, if North Koreans would gain access to everything that the rest of the world has been building on the World Wide Web so far?
Sources:
https://github.com/mandatoryprogrammer/NorthKoreaDNSLeak
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2016/09/26/noord-korea-telt-28-websites-4421325-a1523399
Dear Lisette, thank you for your blog! North Korea is such an interesting country to look at, especially when it comes the population not having access to the world wide web. One may wonder: how is that even possible?! To answer your question, I have no idea what would happen if the population suddenly gained access: would they stand up against their government, or would they think everything online is fake/not true? It really depends on what they truly believe, this I think it highly depends on the person. I don’t think North Koreans will get access to the internet anytime soon, but it would be interesting to see what would happen if they did.