T
Information Flows on the Internet of
Korea
Woo-kung Huh and Hyun Kim
in Korea during the last several years: the infrastructure, online
businesses, domains, and subscribers have all grown fast. OECD
ranked Korea the leader among its member countries in terms of the
broadband penetration rate: 13.9 subscribers per 100 inhabitants as of
June 2001. The penetration rate of the next best performing country,
Canada, is only a little over 6 subscribers per 100 inhabitants.
While studying information flows on the Internet enables us to
understand better how new telecommunications media have affected
the existing spatial structure, there have been few geographic studies
on the Internet. This is perhaps because the advancement of the Internet
is new, so that relevant data are not readily available, and appropriate
methods to analyze the phenomenon are not yet well developed.
Previous studies on the geography of the Internet have touched
mainly upon three subjects, namely the networks functioning as the
paths of information flow, the domains as sources of information, and
flows on the network. The physical nature of the Internet has drawn
more attention than the other subjects of Internet geography, perhaps
because of the availability of data on the networks. Studies examined
the topology of the Internet backbones of Western countries, employing
network connectivity and accessibility measures. Examples are
HE history of the Internet in Korea begins in the mid-1990s,
although the earliest use of the Bitnet goes back to the
1980s. The growth of the Internet has been remarkable