Why did Google (Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen) go to North Korea?

So, you have no shortage of states and diplomats who are trying to articulate an alternative political path that the North Korean regime can go down. Nobody's articulating the alternative technological path that they can go down. So we said, let's talk. Let's tell the North Koreans we want to talk to them about the virtues of a free and open internet, and let's see if they give us a visa, let us into the country, and actually show up. And they did. We wanted to make the argument that they cannot continue to survive, even in their current state, if they don't open up a little bit, because you can't grow your economy in this world if you don't at least allow for some degree of access. Now, North Korea is a bizarre place that I can probably illustrate with one question here: by show of hands, how many of you have either been to a Broadway play or seen the movie The Truman Show? Yes, right. So you kind of know what North Korea is like, which is basically some combination of those two things. What we did learn when we were there is they have Wi-Fi access, they just don't share it with the population. There are a million phones, they're 3G capable, but the data is not turned on. They have 3D television. They have unfiltered internet connection. It's the classic case of the new type of corruption, which is the leadership has the best technology and then they hog it all for themselves at the expense of the rest of the population. The point is that the internet could easily reach the elites anyway of North Korea if the government would simply allow it. It is actually possible for the government to not allow the internet and to shut it off. Various countries, in the book we talk about Egypt, did this for four and a half days, which may have precipitated an even worse outcome in the revolution. In North Korea, we believe that a tremendous improvement in the safety of the world would be to allow information to flow into the last closed society on Earth. It's remarkable to think about a society with no personal music, no personal sources of information, no unfiltered books, two television channels: one of which plays the dear leader's speech over and over again, and the other one plays catchy patriotic music. Imagine such a closed society. Just a few ideas getting in there would significantly improve, in our view, the safety of the world.

Of course, no one knows. The Korean culture is different from other Asian cultures. It's hierarchical and patriarchal. The gentleman who founded modern North Korea managed to kill and execute all the leaders of the religion and put himself in charge of the religion. So it's perfectly possible that North Korea does not become a democracy on day one. It's arrogant of Americans to think that somehow democracy occurs in one day when it took a very long time. America, of course, was formed in a unique way because everybody was a refugee from other places, except for the Indians, who we managed to do a lot of damage to. So the fact of the matter is that it's possible that you could see a transition not unlike what South Korea went through, where South Korea was poor, relatively run by a strong man, relatively unfree, and over some number of decades became much freer and much more democratic.