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.

Most Asian countries are pretty authoritian by nature. Singapore is a prime example, tons of laws, very heavy handed.

It depends on what you consider oppressive. In terms of international freedom indices, South Korea is about as free as the United States of America (https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-world/scores or https://rsf.org/en/index) or not far from it (https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freedom-i...)

Of course this doesn't say much if you don't consider the USA to be a very free country but I'd reckon most of the world still does.

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.

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.