From an Agence France Presse report in Channel News Asia: "A Berlin entrepreneur said that he had signed a deal with North Korean officials to bring Internet access to the country beginning in mid-February, a date chosen to coincide with leader Kim Jong-Il's birthday. Jan Holtermann, a former banker and one-time employee of the North Korean embassy in Berlin, told AFP that the project would involve the use of filtering software similar to that in place in Chinese and Cuban networks. 'We started from the assumption that the North Korean government would be very selective in granting access to the Internet,' he said. A select group of handpicked users will be allowed to send email, and only a few will be able to view information on the web. Holtermann said that the company he founded for the project, KCC Europe, had signed a contract on January 17, 2003 after negotiating with North Korean officials. He said he had invested one million euros in the network's infrastructure, although he initially expects slim profit margins due to the limited number of users. 'This type of business,' he said, 'requires an entirely Asian sense of patience...'"
Holtermann was much more enthused about the deal when he spoke with Germany's Tagesspiegel: there he was quoted as saying that North Korea was tomorrow's India.