North Korea & The Internet

An article posted by the Washington Post details the possibility that North Korea has created only a total of only 28 websites.

To clarify, these 28 sites are not the only sites the country can access: “The vast majority of the country can access only a closed national intranet known as the Kwangmyong— a network of government-approved websites that are thought to number a few thousand.” But still, despite Kwangmyong, North Korea has access to vastly fewer sites than the rest of the world.

A security engineer named Matt Bryant uploaded this mind-boggling information onto GitHub (a website which we should all be familiar with) after he noticed that there were only 28 websites that ended with “.kp,” domain name, which designates sites originating in North Korea. For comparison, Germany has more than 16 million domain addresses that end in “.de”.

This small number of sites most likely reflects the state that North Korea exists in, with little access to the outside world.

Some of the sites include:

• kcna.kp (State News Agency)
• rodong.rep.kp (State Newspaper)
• Air Koryo (National Airline)
• friend.com.kp (“Friend” Social Media site)
• cooks.org.kp (Cooking Recepies)
• korfilm.com.kp (North Korean Movies)

I think this article is especially interesting because our Composing Digital Media course is all about learning to create new websites and composing new means of sharable, online information. This contrasts severely with North Korea’s limited number of accessible websites as well as a small number of sites created by North Korea in the first place. In some ways it is mind-blowing that an American teen can create their own website if they wanted to, yet an adult in North Korea is unable to do so.

This makes me think a lot about freedom-freedom of speech, of creativity, and of knowledge. We are lucky to live in a country where these values are not denied us, and that we have the ability to access such a beautifully vast network of information.