Google's Schmidt plans visit to North Korea

IDG News Service - SEOUL - Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt will join a humanitarian trip to North Korea that may take place as early as this month.

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt's trip to North Korean is called personal although he will travel with former U.N. ambassador and former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson. (Photo by Reuters)

"Chairman Schmidt's trip is completely a personal-related visit and it involves no business plan," said a spokeswoman for a South Korean government agency with knowledge of the matter. Schmidt's trip was first reported Thursday by the Associated Press in Seoul.

Schmidt will travel with Bill Richardson, a former U.N. ambassador and former governor of New Mexico, and Richardson's longtime adviser Tony Namkung, according to news media reports.

A Google spokesman said the company will not comment on the personal travel of executives. No further details of the trip were revealed.

One goal of the trip may be to secure the release of Kenneth Bae, a U.S. citizen the North Korean government recently said it is holding in custody, said Victor Cha, senior adviser and Korea chairman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

It is an intriguing idea that the world's most reclusive state is about to host an Internet company executive who is an avid advocate of borderless information, Cha said in a posting to the CSIS website.

"If Google is the first small step in piercing the information bubble in Pyongyang, it could be a very interesting development," he said.

Access to information technology remains tightly controlled in North Korea, with only an elite class able to connect to uncensored Internet content. However, there are signs that mobile phone use has risen and that the country's intranet has expanded, said Scott Thomas Bruce, an expert in East Asian security at the East-West Center, in an October study on IT in North Korea.

The new young leader Kim Jong-un sees modern technology as a way to boost the country's economy, he said.

3G mobile phones were first introduced to the isolated state in 2008 through a joint venture with Egyptian company Orascom. In February the country's only commercial 3G network, Koryolink, topped 1 million subscribers, according to the North Korea Tech blog.

A cell phone costs about $14 monthly, making it too expensive for the average North Korean, where the GDP per person is less than $2,000 a year, according to Bruce.