Websites in the DPRK’s intranet have access to SSL certificates. Their root CA for all websites within the DPRK is the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology if I’m not mistaken. They also issue certs for their own websites on the internet.
The next step, in this situation, is pushing for certificates from sanctioned countries to be included into free software web browsers. I’d even argue that forking Firefox just to do this is justified, though supporting an up-to-date fork is no easy task, even for small changes like changing the default cert store.
We don’t really have much written on the economic characteristics of software. Our previous attempt to engage in an analysis of software as a commodity led to what we later identified as a legalistic deviation from Marxism. We have been occasionally consulting with advanced members of communist parties to create a workable definition, but nothing has come out of it until now.