South Korea ends Microsoft's online shopping monopoly | Hacker News Reader

South Korea ends Microsoft's online shopping monopoly

news.yahoo.com

33 pointsdko12 comments

Wow... talk about a reign of terror. This is a great example of why governments should never, ever be involved in proscribing use of specific technologies. ActiveX chosen for the sake of security?

... or, say, anything else that involves interpreting complex technical issues such as software patents.

> This is a great example of why governments should never, ever be involved in proscribing use of specific technologies.

I don't know about that. It's now a liability, but a decade ago it probably helped the meteoritic rise of broadband (and broadband-based services including secure ones) and internet usage in Korea. And was part of it anyway (the Korean government very heavily pushed broadband and internet usage in the 90s and early 00s)

Exactly. Governments usually tender out massive contracts to the private sector, and there were very few companies at that time that could probably meet the technical demands. Hence the lock-in.

I guess the problem I see is that they tend to move too slowly. So, they might adopt the technology that was right for two years ago, and then replace it 5 years too late.

This is wonderful news. I remember hearing about this monopoly a while back and was horrified. I always wondered why so many Korean sites were optimized for IE. I'm glad this has happened and can't wait to see the improvements that will come out of this.

Exactly, it seems weird that a country which has the fastest internet in the world has tied itself to the slowest browser around.

To be fair, the ActiveX encryption requirement only applied to domestic credit cards. If you were paying by foreign-issued credit card --- even if you were buying stuff from a Korean shop for delivery within Korea --- it was perfectly legal for the merchant to skip the ActiveX junk (and resident registration number verification, the other major nightmare for foreigners) and just use good old https.

Unfortunately, few ever bothered. Kyobo Books deserves some props at this point for getting this working early --- ordered stuff from them at Christmas with a foreign credit card and foreign billing address, and everything worked perfectly. Their competitors like Aladdin and Yes24 deserve a collective smack upside the head.

According to the article, the iPhone was ultimately the trigger that finally broke the country's ActiveX dependence, and will thereby open up the desktop browser market as a side effect.

It's a success story with parallels to Apple's ongoing attempt to break the web's de facto Flash requirement, and to Mozilla's stand to break dependence on non-free video codecs.

But Apple and Mozilla's new battles are harder. In toppling ActiveX, the iPhone (and the phones it inspired) got a gift from Windows Mobile, by being so stagnant that it left a huge opening. But the iPhone now has a credible competitor in Android, with newly-minted Flash support. And Mozilla has high-quality competitors that offer H.264 support. (Chrome will support both WebM and H.264, so Google isn't taking the hard-line stance that would follow if they valued breaking H.264 over immediate gains in market share.)

For now, Apple has the iPad's market to itself, which gives it great latitude to further weaken Flash. Mozilla is in a more difficult position, so it will be interesting to see what they are able to achieve.

For background information, here's a write-up on the matter:

http://blog.mozilla.com/gen/2010/04/28/the-security-of-inter...

I find it amusing that "Active X" is referred to as a data-encryption framework

Like flash this was another stumbling block for anyone that wanted to make a browser and I am glad to see if fall. I got more then one request to add ActiveX to Arora.

"South Korean regulators realised the rules were preventing businesses from offering services to smartphones."

I wish it had been because of all of the existing browsers that don't support ActiveX on the desktop, but I'll take browsers on the smartphone as the reason.

Probably because after a decade of Windows/IE lock, their very idea of internet is a blue "e" on their desktop.

After this long, I bet most South Koreans think we, non-IE users, are nothing but an eccentric bunch.

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