Netian

» see netian.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Free hosting was one of the few things the 1998 web gave away without asking, and everyone on a modem was on the receiving end of it somewhere. What i was not around for is the Korean shape of it, which is different enough to be worth writing down. Netian put the free homepage at the center of a portal instead of in a suburb of one, and it did that in february 1998, before most of the world had decided personal pages were a category at all.

The company behind it was HancomNet, a subsidiary of Hangul and Computer, the firm whose word processor is the reason Korean office documents still end in.hwp. It renamed itself Netian in june 1999. The pitch was straightforward: sign up, get an address, get space, and the portal grows around what you put in it. Membership went past 7.3 million, in a country of forty-seven million people.

Then it stopped. From about 2000 onward Netian had no second act and nothing to sell the millions of people holding free accounts. In late 2002 the free space came down from twenty megabytes to three, which is the kind of decision that tells every user exactly what shape the company is in. A content scandal in 2004 pushed a wave of members out, and the ones who stayed were leaving for blogs anyway.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

Korea's personal-page habit went somewhere Netian could not follow. Cyworld's minihompy arrived with a decorated room and its own currency, and next to that the free static homepage started looking like a filing cabinet. Naver and Daum were building blog platforms with the search traffic already pointed at them. Netian's whole asset was millions of pages nobody was updating.

Ownership got worse in step with the business. By late 2005 the company had been taken over by Cosmo C&T, a KOSDAQ-listed firm, and by mid-2006 staff had gone months without salary. The hosting bill had been unpaid for long enough to reach several hundred million won.

~ what got buried with it ~

On 31 july 2006 the hosting company disconnected the line and Netian vanished from the internet in one move. Public complaint got a partial payment out of the parent and the site came back on 3 august, on a promise to settle the rest. The rest was not settled and everything went off again on 15 august. On 28 august the bankruptcy was processed.

The people worst hit were not the hobbyists. Netian had been renting shopping-mall space to small businesses at around a hundred thousand won a month, and those merchants found their storefronts gone with no notice and no export. The free homepages went the same way, which is eight years of somebody's photographs and guestbook entries deleted by an unpaid invoice rather than by a policy decision.

The domain kept moving afterward. Seoul Mobile Telecom bought the right to use netian.com out of the bankruptcy estate in february 2007, another company took it over that july, and a relaunch went live on 5 september 2007 as a messaging service with no relation to the portal. That did not last either. netian.com does not resolve in 2026.

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