Executive
chairman to travel to the country on a private mission led by former New Mexico
governor Bill Richardson
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Eric Schmidt: North Korean trip would be the first by a top executive from US -based Google, the world’s largest internet search provider. Photograph: Lee Jin-Man/AP |
Google's
executive chairman is preparing to travel to one of the last frontiers of cyberspace:
North Korea.
Eric Schmidt will travel to the country on a private, humanitarian mission led by
former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson as early as this month.
The trip
would be the first by a top executive from US-based Google, the world's largest
internet search provider, to a country considered to have the most restrictive
internet policies in the world.
North Korea
is in the midst of what leader Kim Jong-un called a modern-day industrial
revolution in a New Year's Day speech.
He is pushing
science and technology as a path to economic development for the impoverished
country, aiming for computers in every school and digitised machinery in every
factory.
However,
giving citizens open access to the internet has not been part of North Korea's
strategy. While some North Koreans can access a domestic intranet service, very
few have clearance to freely surf the web.
It remains
highly unlikely Google will push to launch a business venture in the country,
according to Victor Cha, a former senior Asia specialist in the Bush
administration.
"Perhaps
the most intriguing part of this trip is simply the idea of it," said Cha,
an analyst with the Centre for Strategic and International Studies thinktank in
Washington. Kim Jong-un "clearly has a penchant for the modern
accoutrements of life", he said.
"If
Google is the first small step in piercing the information bubble in Pyongyang,
it could be a very interesting development."
It was not
immediately clear whom Schmidt and Richardson expect to meet in North Korea, a
country that does not have diplomatic relations with the US.
North Korea
has almost no business with companies in the US, which has banned the import of
North Korean-made goods.
Schmidt,
however, has been a vocal advocate of providing people around the world with
internet access and technology.
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Kim Jong-un said 2013
would be a year of creations
and changes
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