Constraining online maps: The case of South Korea
July 1, 2012 Stefan Geens 5 Comments
If you are a web-based service provider and don’t have operations in a specific country, then that country’s laws cannot constrain the services you provide to users there. If Bahrain were to decide it doesn’t like Google’s maps, it could try to block the relevant URLs wholesale, but it has no legal recourse to compel Google to censor its maps. That’s because there are no Googlers, Google servers, or Google Street View cars in Bahrain.
But with Google’s global operations now having expanded to over 40 countries, far more countries are able to regulate the services Google provides locally. And when it comes to mapping and location-based services, some of them most definitely do.
Over the years, China and India have been the two main countries tracked on this blog for authoritarian tendencies when it comes to borders, names and third-party content. Because of the size of these two markets, Google has generally acquiesced to the legal restrictions governing locally published web maps, but has always made sure to contain the damage to the datasets aimed at these countries. Local users have always had recourse to the unmolested content served from outside the country — the reference content of maps.google.com and Google Earth.
Recently, it has become apparent that South Korea has also been placing constraints on what maps.google.co.kr is allowed to show. Because South Korea’s laws are easily accessible, this makes for an interesting case study in how Google tries to accommodate local laws in its local services without compromising the integrity of its global dataset.
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Why is Google’s Korean map behaving this way? In short, because of Korea’s Spatial Data Industry Promotion Act from 2009, specifically Article 7, which states that:
Spatial data business operators may produce and distribute any processed spatial data. In such cases, processed spatial data shall not include any spatial data on any military base provided for in subparagraph 1 of Article 2 of the Protection of Military Bases and Installations Act nor on any military installation provided for in subparagraph 2 of the said Article.
https:// ogleearth.com/2012/07/constraining-online-maps-the-case-of-south-korea/