Two IT related articles caught my eye this week. The first suggests that Apple’s iPhone’s success in Korea may fall short because subscribers won’t have access to Apple’s App Store games offering.

Games account for more than 50 percent of Apple’s revenue from its App Store, which enables users to download applications such as games, multimedia files and office software for their iPhone and iPod Touch devices for free or at a small cost.

However, Korean iPhone users will be blocked from accessing App Store’s games category, at least at first, as local law requires all game content to be reviewed and approved by the state before being made commercially available.

The fact that Korea has such a law was very surprising to me. In the States, the government imposed regulations that movies, music and even video games be rated for age restrictions. However, they have pretty much left it up to those industries to self regulate. Hollywood, the music, and gaming industries have set up their own independent review boards to produce ratings. In Korea, it seems in the case of games at least, the government has taken it upon itself to not just rate by authorize the sale of video games.

You have to wonder what staff they have to perform this task. Reviewing a video game is not like reviewing a movie or music. Most games don’t have linear content that can be examined in a fixed amount of time. To see the entire content of most multi-level games takes a great deal of time and actual game playing skill that few people have.

There is high demand for games in Korea. There are even TV programs that just show young people competing at video games. Over regulation of games will just drive fans to seek the services of hackers on darknets; the blackmarket back alleys of the Internet that modern browsers warn you not to enter.

This seems like another IT regulation the Korean government came up with before giving it enough thought.

The next article dealt with the poor reviews for SK Telecom’s Apps Store. If you haven’t been following it, when SK noticed the commercial success of Apple’s Apps Store overseas, they thought they could exploit the iPhone’s absence in Korea and offer their own Apps store.

The problem is they not only have a relatively small amount of content to offer, but they insist on maintaining a practice that makes their data downloads prohibitively expensive.

The biggest complaint is that the applications listed on T-Store could not be downloaded through computers or Wi-Fi connections, but only through SK Telecom’s third-generation (3G) mobile data network, which has been ignored by a larger part of users because of expensive rates.

Users who are not subscribed to SK Telecom’s fixed-rate data plans will have to pay for 3G network usage on a per-packet basis, not a great option as the company charges 3.5 won per kilobyte.

So downloading the 1,349-kilobyte “2009 Pro Baseball” mobile game, one of the most popular programs made available on T-Store, will cost users nearly 5,000 won for network usage, in addition to paying 3,000 won for the game itself.

The mobile version of “Blue Marble,” a “Monopoly” imitation, will cost users about 4,000 won to download, although the game itself is provided for free.

Downloading software bigger than 2 or 3 megabytes may easily cost the user around 10,000 won.

I learned of this type of thing the first time I tried to download an ‘inexpensive’ ring-tone to my cellphone. It sucked all of the 5000 won of remaining credits from my phone before the download could even complete.

They need to adopt a simple and inexpensive flat rate service fee that includes both voice and data.

Korea received a lot of deserved credit for launching itself into the top tier of Internet usage countries. But, it seems like heavy handed decisions by government and industry may cause Korea to stumble and fall behind in the movement towards the next generation of mobile and commercial IT services.