The law as I recall it a decade ago was a bit more specific: you could only store and process the data in South Korea. Thus, the whole planet's tiles were rendered in production on Borg, except for SK, whose tiles had to be rendered on a workstation under somebody's desk in the Seoul office. That meant no fancy mapreduces, let alone any rendering on the fly like the Maps API allows (selecting what details to show on the map, their look, etc.). Then, IIRC, the rendered bitmap tiles had to be pushed from the workstation to production. Vector maps, at the time, would have been heresy. Google asked for years to have the laws changed. Korean companies weren't affected, at least until they moved their own rendering to e.g. a cloud provider outside the country.