As you might expect, North Korea's "Internet" mirrors North Korea itself: Sad, secluded, and limited to just a handful of propagandistic sites.

There's a country-wide intranet, and the content consists of state news and message boards. A custom-built operating system, Red Star, includes a mandatory readme file about "how important it is that the operating system correlates with the country's values." Whenever leader Kim Jong Un is mentioned, his name is displayed slightly bigger than the text around it.

And the weirdest part about it? It doesn't have to be that way.

In a recent conversation with The Atlantic's Steve Clemons, Google chairman Eric Schmidt and Google Ideas director Jared Cohen -- who co-wrote the new book The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations, and Business -- mentioned that North Korea actually has the capacity for a full-fledged Internet network. It just chooses not to have one.

The mobile networks are there, Schmidt said, the country's leadership just hasn't turned on the data.