You know what is really hilarious in this Youtube Korea fiasco?

I'd like to think of google's decision to ban uploads for the users with the location set to "Korea" as a sort of tongue-in-cheek rebellion against the Draconian "Real Name Act", for even a relatively-computer-illiterate Korean is able to bypass the ban by simply changing the location setting. I even get the feeling that google is actually actively encouraging the bypass "hack", with kind advertisements of the effect achieved by changing one's region setting.

Now, for ordinary Korean citizen youtubers, changing the location setting means just the one-time inconvenience of a few simple clicks in the preference panel and that's it. No harm done. Nothing to write home about.

When your youtube account officially represents government agencies, however, it becomes a whole lot different story. Your region setting now takes on a symbolic meaning, and you would think twice before fiddling with the region setting , which is there for the whole wide world to see , to upload some promotional video clips.

Imagine you're in the hypothetical year 2003, right before G. Bush is about to invade Iraq. In this alternate Earth, US enacted their own version of the "Real Name Act", forcing google to ban uploads from the users with the country setting of "US". The White House, eager to upload video clips emphasizing the threats the Iraqi-owned WMD -- still a vaporware even in this fantastic version of the alternate Universe -- will pose to the world, decides to change the country setting for the White House account to...

... "France" (Gasp) !

"Get Real!", you would say. Well, this is what will be "really" happening to the Korean version of the White House (so called the "Blue House") youtube account, sort of.

"Blue House" has been uploading weekly radio speech by the Korean President Lee, titled "Address to the Nation" to Youtube on the channel http://www.youtube.com/presidentmblee. How was the blue house to handle the google decision? They couldn't just kill the "show", since they had officially pronounced that the Blue House would be "proudly" uploading the speeches to youtube long before they could anticipate this type of conundrum.

Last week, on the heels of the upload ban decision by google, there followed an announcement by the blue house spokesperson that the gov't will continue the uploading, only this time, the account owner's country content preference will be set to...

well, fortunately for them, one of the option was this :

"Worldwide".

Their explanation?
"The president's speeches are uploaded for the benefit of the worldwide audience".
Like anyone outside Korea would even care what Lee has to say ( Even the Koreans themselves mostly couldn't care less. Lee is largely a subject of taunt and ridicule amongst the Korean internet users.)

The excuse becomes lamer when we find out that the content of the speeches almost exclusively consist of government propaganda on the internal affairs of Korea. Even the title itself is "Address to the Nation", not to the "World".

I would classify this hilarious fiasco as a classic example of "Self-defeating Legislations".

Korean language websites hosted overseas solely for the purpose of circumventing government censorship have already sprung up years ago, specializing in the areas related to the, well you guessed right, pornography.

The powers that be in (south) Korea are adopting measures similar to those employed by the Chinese gov't in blocking Falun Gung related internet traffic to block access to the aforementioned hardcore porn sites. I hear that some Koreans are even using the "ultrasurf", the very same tool that was created to evade Falun Gung crackdown in China, to connect to the sites.

The real horror is the not so unlikely possibility in the near future that Koreans might have to resort to the "ultrasurf" to connect to overseas hosted Korean language websites just to exercise their right of free speech of making fun of asinine gov't policies.

South Korea is certainly going to be a superpower in the IT landscape at least in the area of...

censoring "sensitive" traffic in real time.