Conventional wisdom never gets you very far when you’re trying to understand the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Take, for example, the bizarre, self-contained universe that is the North Korean internet.In the past few weeks, there’s been a spike in chatter about the House of Kim’s Web presence. First came speculation about what North Korean netizens were being told about the botched missile launch, then came self-satisfied mockery of the $15 page template the regime bought for its English-language site. The takeaway might seem pretty simple: the DPRK’s network is censored and silly, like a dime-store version of China’s.But the reality is much weirder. “Maybe only one-tenth of the online freedom you see in China is present in North Korea,” said Kongdan Oh, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.That’s not because the censors are tougher. It’s because North Korea built its own internet.Read the rest over at Motherboard.