"Information wants to be free" doesn't apply to North Korea because they never had access to the Internet as we know it? Information is only dependent on the Internet insofar as the Internet is a transmission medium. Other media exist even in NK- print, broadcast, word-of-mouth.
Information can be exchanged freely by whispering voices.
That information has a much higher chance of corruption while in transit, and the bandwidth is low. People can't broadcast photos and videos through whispers for instance.
Whether the information is corruptible isn't the issue. Freedom to share it is. Before the Internet, we had entire civilizations (even free ones) built on communication that was less than perfect. I'm sure that in the early years of the USA broadcasting photos and videos wasn't a high priority, yet, somehow, freedom to share information was acknowledged as a basic human right that must not be removed.