Korean IT sector reproducing Japanese disaster?

It seems Korea is touched by a local form of BigCompanizite, with innovations being kept at bay by monopolies and walled gardens:

For starters, Korea is the only developed country in the world that has yet to see iPhones, the gold standard of modern smart phones. Local carriers, bent on protecting their walled garden are still hesitant to embrace the breakthrough phone [...]

Samsung and LG may be selling some of the most advanced touchscreen phones in the global market, but amazingly when those high-end phones are released for the local folks, they are sans Wi-Fi for fear of getting on the nerves of local carriers. [...]

The freedom of speech in the Korean Cyberspace is rapidly deteriorating as well, amid flurry of recent legislation that ranges from the real name log-on system that invited a sharp rebuke from YouTube Korea and the three-strike rule for online copyright infringements. [...]

The recent developments in the Korean IT sector remind many industry observers of the spectacular failure of another nation in Asia — Japan.

Back in the late 1990′s and well into the early 2000′s, Japan was full of eye-popping handsets that were an envy of the global IT world and a torrent of sophisticated innovations were pouring out of the mobile Internet sector. But like the Galapagos Islands, Japan took its own unique evolutionary path in the technology, cut off from the rest of the world. It is now a well-established fact that Japan had to hurry later to catch up with the Web, ironically because of its sophisticated — but highly insular — innovations in the homegrown mobile internet.

Link (thanks Olivier)