When hackers attack, you know the market's reached critical mass

This report on CNN about how Microsoft's MSN site hacked was in South Korea tells us some interesting things about how the market is developing:

1. It is now already big enough to be worthy of serious hacker attack. We probably already knew that: the broadband wiring of the South Korean Internet has been widely reported. But I believe we will be seeing more of this across Asia as other markets like India and China reach serious usage levels.

2. S. Korea leads Asia's online gaming industry. This is putting enormous strains, for example, on fibre capacity between China and Korea. The inter-connection of different countries in the region and their inter-dependence in the information industry is a topic to which we shall no doubt return.

This touches on just a couple of the issues posed for regulators by Broadband, wi-fi and the other technical developments under-pinning much of the information/media revolution sweeping Asia as it is the rest of the world. Widespread and high-speed access is widely seen by most governments in the region as an essential component of their development. It is. But, as Deng Xiaoping is reputed to have said "When you open the windows, flies will come in too". Remember, also, his less-quoted second sentence "We say, 'Open the windows, breathe the fresh air and at the same time fight the flies and insects'". Watch how they fight and what they consider to be flies.