While President Yoon Suk-yeol aspires for South Korea to become a “global pivotal state,” the country lags significantly behind in navigation and location-based technology, posing a surprising and inconvenient reality for tourists and tech companies alike.

Each year, a growing number of tourists are taken aback by the difficulty of utilizing popular services like Google Maps and Apple Maps for navigation within the country. The challenge has endured for years, all under the pretext of “national security.”

These constraints aren’t a recent phenomenon. Google has been contending with South Korean authorities for over a decadefor permission to utilize the