Gen Kanai: WIPI in Korea or non-tariff barriers to mobile competition

Last year I wrote about the de-facto monopoly of Microsoft Internet Explorer in South Korea (Slashdot, Digg, etc.) Everyone I tell this story to in the Internet industry, who is not South Korean, is amazed and surprised by such a reality. Now I hear that the South Korean government?s Mobile Platform Special Subcommittee of the Korea Wireless Internet Standardization Forum (KWISF), in an attempt to create competition (or some say block foreign competition) in the mobile application space, required a Korean-developed middleware standard on all Korean mobile phones, WIPI or (Wireless Internet Platform for Interoperability), which effectively closed the Korean market to international competition. I first heard about WIPI only a few days ago, on Channy Yun?s Korea Crunch weblog. Then Changwon Kim blogged about the negative impact of WIPI in Korea at Web 2.0 Asia: Korean government mulling over scraping WIPI altogether. Here are some other recent choice quotes about the impact of WIPI in South Korea: The Korea Times: Wireless Operators in Talks With Nokia, Apple Over Phones ?The one remaining trade barrier for foreign handset makers is ?WIPI,? or ?Wireless Internet Platform for Interoperability,? a software standard that the government mandated in 2005 for all mobile-phone makers planning to deliver Internet access on handsets. With Korea accounting for just 2 percent of the world?s mobile-phone market, it was hard to convince the foreign handset makers to produce WIPI-enabled phones not usable elsewhere. However, the KCC, the country?s telecommunications regulator, is now considering scrapping the WIPI requirements, amid criticism that maintaining a fixed software standard would mean little when the global industry trend leans toward the adoption of open-source operating systems for wireless platforms. FT.com: view original article
Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:04:22 +0200

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