North Korea Shows Eric Schmidt It Knows How to Google

As Bill Richardson and Eric Schmidt's excellent adventure to the Internet Black Hole known as North Korea carries on, they visited some of the only people in the country who are allowed access to the Internet.

As Bill Richardson and Eric Schmidt's excellent adventure to the Internet Black Hole known as North Korea carries on, the former New Mexico governor and Google chair visited some of the only people in the country who are allowed access to the Internet: the students at Kim Il Sung University. Here's the AP with actual video of a North Korean Googling something:

And they have photos, too — even if they look sort of staged:

And one more:

And there's this one. We aren't fluent in Korean, but the guy in the foreground doesn't look like he's surfing the web so much much as he's reading a document:

Why get excited over people doing something so mundane as browsing the Internet? Well, North Koreans don't really do that — or, um, aren't allowed to do that. The country's ban on Internet access is renowned. "The North Korean government has strictly controlled internet usage regarding how long people are able to log on, where they can log on, and the contents which they can view, for all of the almost twenty years since it was introduced," reads a document from the Asia Internet History Project. And Reporters Without Borders regularly cites North Korea as an "enemy of the Internet."