Yeah it could be a cultural thing though - in our culture this kind of stuff is squarely up to the parents. I remember always BBS'ing from midnight because my daily connection time renewed at midnight :) As long as it didn't affect my school performance it was not a problem for my parents, and it was a handy time because they didn't make personal calls during the night so I didn't tie up the phone line for them. It would have been unthinkable that the government would decide I should be in bed at that time.
Perhaps the culture requires the country to take a stronger role in this, though embedding it into law feels very severe. Even in Europe a lot of this stuff that used to be up to the parents is being taken to central control. More and more countries are proposing laws for a website to verify the user is 18+. I don't like where this is going either. When I was living in Ireland my local provider "Three" routed all my mobile traffic through a super slow child-friendly filtering proxy and I had to ID myself in one of their stores to get past that. People were referring it as the "porn viewers register" and the people in the store were being weird about it, even though it blocked way more than porn sites (also random UDP connections for example so most VPNs didn't work) and it made internet access super slow and quirky.
Luckily the other mobile providers didn't have this boneheaded rule so I simply switched to Vodafone.
I kinda wonder to what extent neo-Confucian norms are widespread among Korea's elites, because that might explain quite a bit about its internal politics.
I consider lack of digital freedom quite oppressive, especially given "software eating the world" trend. The fact that they even can tell the age of person playing games during night time in the first place sounds quite sketchy to me (I guess I'm supposed to tie my gaming account to my real id?).
In Korea you do. In part because of multiple things such as a desire to prevent defamation, which is a big deal in Korea because people take their reputation very seriously and bullying is a big problem as a result, having notably lead to multiple high profile suicides. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korean_cyber_defamation_...
The laws on libel and slander are notorious for being very alien to westerners. In particular saying something true but bad about someone isn't typically libel in other countries, but in Korea it is: true or false, you shouldn't speak ill of people.
It's a very different society where very different tradeoffs have been made.
Different cultural norms. Korea has a strong paternalistic tangent running through. Corporations are paternalistic, governments are paternalistic. As a foreigner you might feel this is simply oppression, because you lack the context so it comes to you as simply oppressive and nothing more.
I'm one of those foreigners who didn't appreciate that my apartment's management office would blast public broadcast messages directly inside my apartment at 8AM to say stuff like "there's a farmer's market in the parking lot today (like every week)". I asked them to stop spamming my household via their PA system for non-emergency stuff and they thought I was a antisocial psychopath.
Then I learned and just disconnect the PA system. They don't mean to invade my privacy, but my privacy boundaries aren't the same as theirs.
Wasn't controlled by the landlord, but by the management team which is paid by the condo fee. If you own the condo, you pay that fee, if you rent it from a landlord you also pay it. The management team I believe is hired by the residents committee which is elected by the residents. Sort of like an HOA, I guess? There were elections during my stay and we were invited to participate, but I didn't care enough and this was a temporary situation.
This was in a large apartment tower complex in the semi-countryside. Not sure if it's always like that, it's the only apartment I stayed in. In Seoul I've only lived in villas.
Perhaps it's a countryside thing because I've also noticed noisy public speakerphones in the streets blasting PAs about random stuff, but I haven't seen it in Seoul.
Overall though, the local governments do spam your phone with alerts about all sorts of remotely relevant (IMO) things on a daily/hourly basis. I find it annoying but it's just how it is here. Today they were spamming about possible debris from a NASA satellite deorbiting.
It was very interesting to me that South Korea is a high trust society in terms of crime (cash boxes left unattended, bicycles unlocked, people feel safe to walk the streets alone late at night), however it is very tribal and low trust in terms of providing assistance (less help provided to strangers in the streets compared to the US.. I've had to step in multiple times as I noticed that local Koreans were not helping). Maybe it's a big city thing (above experiences were in Seoul).
Haha, now I vaguely remember something like that in soviet union’s “rest houses” (was a kid, may mistake it for something else). I think I slept next to a speaker on the wall and wanted to kick it.
It’s very nice of you to respect cultural aspects, but I suspect that at least some koreans also simply disconnect it and accept the risks :)
Like Japan, it's a "one and a half party state"; while there are multiple parties and free elections, in practice one party wins a majority almost all the time and there's very little space for diverse viewpoints.
It's more like "two party state" though. Take a look at presidential election results[0]: after Chun Doo-hwan's(전두환) military dictatorship ended, candidates from conservative and liberal parties were elected taking turns.
