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Google Maps Finally Fully Unlocks in South Korea

In a historic policy reversal, the South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT) granted Google conditional approval to export high-precision, 1:5,000 scale geospatial data out of the country. This decision effectively ends a 15-year stalemate that had rendered Google Maps "functionally broken" for international travelers and locals alike. Since 2011, Seoul had blocked the export of this data, citing national security risks given the ongoing technical state of war with North Korea. With this approval, Google can finally integrate South Korea into its global routing servers, enabling features that were previously unavailable or severely limited, such as turn-by-turn walking directions, real-time driving navigation, and detailed cycling routes.

Tourism and "Geo-AI" as Economic Drivers

The Ministry cited the 2026 "Visit Korea" Year initiative as a primary catalyst for the change. Tourism officials noted that the "uselessness" of Google Maps was a top complaint among foreign visitors who struggled with the Korean-only interfaces of local giants like Naver Map and Kakao Map. Beyond tourism, the government is betting that opening this data will fuel the domestic "Geo-AI" industry. By allowing Google to integrate Korean geography into its advanced machine learning models, the ministry hopes to accelerate the development of autonomous driving simulations and high-precision 3D digital twins of Korean cities, provided that Google invests back into the local geospatial ecosystem.

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