[yongjik]

- South Korea has the fortune of understanding the importance of internet "infrastructure", and being a dense country, manages to roll out first-class internet before most other nations.

- Burgeoning domestic services start to take root.

- Government sets up various crazy laws that make doing internet business extremely painful, killing innovation. Large carriers (KT, SKT, LG) exert tight control of the market, killing innovation in the mobile space.

- Only a few giant corporations survive (e.g., Naver and Kakaotalk). When foreign products (Youtube, iPhone, etc.) eventually break into the market, there's no meaningful domestic competitor.

There was a time when everybody had a Cyworld account: you never heard about it, because it was acquired by SKT, and they didn't want it to cannibalize their mobile services. Nobody uses it any more. We all moved to Facebook.

I heard it's somewhat getting better these days.