Digital Media in East Asia: National Innovation and the Transform ...

The emergence of the wireless Internet provided East Asia much-needed opportunities. Given the size of the region’s population and the cost and difficulties associated with running landlines throughout the countryside, the wireless option greatly sped up the reach and impact of the Internet. The availability of mobile phones and the mobile Internet—particularly after the critical development of the i-mode phone by NTT DoCoMo in Japan—revolutionized the Internet in the region.¹⁸ Within a few years, East Asia led the world in mobile phone and mobile Internet use, pioneered e-commerce operations and digital applications much in advance of the United States and most other countries, and attempted to export what the Japanese called the “keitai revolution” to the rest of the world. In short order, Internet-enabled mobile phones became ubiquitous in East Asia, in part because the new technology was well suited to the commuting and small home environment in the region. While Western countries lagged well behind, until the RIM Blackberry and the Apple iPhone brought the United States and other countries into the age of the mobile Internet, East Asian countries forged ahead with many successful implementations and uses of the mobile systems.

Digital Management Systems

East Asia has enjoyed mixed success in building the software backbone to the Internet technologies. Many of the key content management systems in use in the region, including SAP and Open Text, involve localization of Western products. The region has not been as successful in developing global markets for its business enterprise software, although the growing East Asian market has permitted companies to grow significantly. Equally, and particularly in China, the question of the management of intellectual property rights remains a fundamental flaw in the East Asian Internet system. Loose regulation of commercial and creative IP has convinced some firms to stay out or, as in the case of Google, reconsider their place in the Chinese market.¹⁹ The same, of course, holds for the rest of the world, where peer-to-peer file-sharing systems have undercut the viability