This leaves out the other 40 million South Koreans, who do not find themselves among the sky people crowded into Seoul. Perhaps it would be even more correct to say that the Net has helped to integrate provincial South Koreans better into the culture of privileged Seoul-dwellers?

It's hard to know how to apply US principles of free speech, at the comparatively detailed doctrinal level, to Korean legal phenomena, and hard to apply concepts more broadly in any reliable mapping, because the two social systems could hardly be more different. The US Supreme Court, which has not been particularly interested in or solicitous of anonymity, has decided its few anonymity cases in the area of campaign speech, where it is particularly obvious within our terms of social reference, even to Justices, that anonymity must be protected by the First Amendment.

But we are also certain since New York Times v. Sullivan, half a century ago, that limitations on defamation law (not merely limitations on disclosure of speakers' identities, but on liability for defamation altogether) are also constitutionally required in order to ensure "robust, wide-open and uninhibited" public debate. So if we were really to be applying anything like US concepts, let alone specific constitutional doctrine, your conclusion would be difficult to reach.

Instead, we are asking different questions, answerable only within their own cultural frame. It be helpful, I think, to spell out the spectrum of positions likely to be taken on the issues within the Korean discourse. What we need most is to see the span of concepts that will be employed by all the parties engaged in the argument, in order to appreciate not what you or I might do with the US law we know, but what the real values are underlying the various Korean positions: what the native-speakers of that law talk think they are saying, and why they think they are saying it.