At BoxDev, a developer event held in San Francisco on April 22nd, Google CEO Eric Schmidt referred to North Korea as having “the worst
Internet accessibility in the world,” reported Washington D.C.-based Voice of America [VOA] on April 28th.
Schmidt visited North Korea in January of
2012 to survey the country’s internet system and determined that “the North
Korean regime stringently blocks people’s access to the Internet.” He added, “Even the North’s intranet, a computer network that is used only domestically and partially
permitted, is thoroughly regulated.”
University students, if allowed to access
the internet at all, are assigned to monitor each other’s activity. He went on
to highlight the importance of providing residents with access to the Internet, asserting that the North
Korean regime systematically keeps its citizens in the dark by isolating them
from the external world.
As a final question, Box CEO Aaron Levie
asked Schmidt about the prospect of cloud sharing services coming to North
Korea, to which he responded that such a move would be highly illegal under
current regulations.
