South Korea ended a 20-year blockade on Google Maps today, granting conditional approval for the service to export high-precision geographic data after decades of national security objections tied to the ongoing Korean War stalemate.
The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport approved Google's request to export 1:5,000-scale digital maps, a resolution that will finally enable real-time driving directions and detailed business listings through Google Maps in one of the world's last major markets where the service was essentially non-functional.
"We welcome today’s decision and look forward to our ongoing collaboration with local officials to bring a fully functioning Google Maps to Korea," Google senior executive Cris Turner told The New York Times in a statement obtained by Engadget.
Approval comes with surveillance-state level restrictions designed to protect military installations from potential exposure. All sensitive geographic data must be processed on servers located within South Korea before any information leaves the country, according to Finimize.
Military bases and critical infrastructure sites will be obscured in mapping imagery, and longitude-latitude coordinates for sensitive locations remain restricted.
The policy reversal follows years of pressure from Washington during trade negotiations, where U.S. officials argued South Korea's map data restrictions unfairly disadvantaged American technology companies.
Seoul had maintained the export ban since 2007 over concerns that high-resolution cartography could reveal military positions along the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea, two nations still technically at war since their 1950-1953 conflict ended with an armistice rather than a peace treaty.
Google previously applied for map data export permissions in both 2007 and 2016 without success. During those two decades, domestic navigation apps including Naver Map and Kakao Map captured approximately 85 percent of South Korea's $10 billion navigation market, according to Techi.
Local analysts express concern about potential market disruption now that global competition enters a previously protected ecosystem. "If Naver and Kakao are weakened or pushed out and Google later raises prices, that becomes a monopoly," geography professor Choi Jin-mu told Reuters in comments reported by Engadget.
"Then, even companies that rely on map services, logistics firms, for example, become dependent [on Google]."
The approval includes emergency protocols allowing Seoul to trigger an instant reversal if security protocols are violated. A "red button" system will enable rapid shutdown of data exports during imminent national security threats, while a dedicated local officer must maintain constant communication between Google and South Korean authorities.
Implementation specifics including compliance controls and rollout schedules will become clear over coming months as Google establishes required local infrastructure.
