I think President Lee thinks of the Internet more as "poison" than "cure".

President Lee MyungBak, whom I'm sure has been quite emotionally devastated from all these protests and from the improbably quick fall of his support--it went all the way down to 7%. Remember it was at 22% few days ago and 50% few months ago?--gave the keynote speech at Future of the Internet, an OECD Ministerial meeting being held in Korea right now.

Lee, grappling with IT-inspired mass protests over his decision to resume US beef imports, bemoaned the "spread of falsehoods" via the Internet in a speech to an OECD ministerial meeting on information technology.
"The Internet economy is expediting the development of a knowledge-based society, thus leading to new economic growth and job creation," he said.
Lee also called for the Internet to "be a space of trust. Otherwise, the force of the Internet could turn out to be venomous rather than beneficial."
He also noted that the system is still out of the reach of 80 percent of the world's people and pledged Korea's efforts to redress the situation. "The Internet gap is bound to lead to a socio-economic cleavage between individuals and nations, and the gap will be ever-widening."

Now, one particular phrase I paid attention to was "venomous rather than beneficial". A better translation of what he said is actually "poison rather than cure."

I believe that's his honest stance on the Internet that it's just powerful and could go either way. He's even created the Ministry of Knowledge Economy, so I'm sure he does believe in the power of the Internet for economy growth.

But, apparently he views the Internet more as poison and than cure at this moment. Just few hours before he gave the speech, the CEO of Afreeca.com was arrested. Remember Afreeca? That was the citizen broadcasting station for many Korean people. You might go "What? President Lee let the CEO of Afreeca arrested in effort to kill the freedom of speech? I thought South Korea was a well-established democratic country!"

Well, to be fair, let me explain more. Moon Yong Sik is the CEO of Nowcom, which runs a Web-disk service as well was Afreeca. Moon was actually arrested with copyright violation charges because of the Web-disk service. A Web-disk service is basically an unlimited file-uploading and file-sharing service where you can basically upload/download anything you want, like P2P, including movies, mp3s, porn clips, documents, ripped software CD images, etc. Obviously, there's been a long battle between the copyright holders and those companies, especially as they are actually making quite a bit of money through the services.

So what happened to Moon is quite legit. Can't argut with that. But here's the problem.

I do believe there's a serious chance that this was a pure coincidence. But, come on! And here's even more serious problem.

President Lee might have just offered another tool for people to use against him with. Again, it might have been coincidental, but ain'g gonna do any good to restore his reputation.

Protests are still going on with less ferver than before. The only question for President Lee might be "pick your poison" now. The Internet is powerful and could go either way. So, please make it work good for you. And what Lee's doing isn't necessarily the right way to do it.