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A concern is that if ever your product on this platform gets big, friction with the (often unpredictable) Chinese gov and policies will become a liability. exa
by EZ-E 9y ago
A concern is that if ever your product on this platform gets big, friction with the (often unpredictable) Chinese gov and policies will become a liability.
example : your product displays news. Some of these might considered not acceptable by the Chinese govt and cause you to get shut down or blocked
- JumpCrisscross 9y agoOr you end up competing with something booted up by someone powerful's kid. Operating in these systems is a totally different skill set from competing in international markets.
- EZ-E 9y agoYes, I forgot to mention that. If you're a foreign company and bringing some damaging competition to a Chinese local owned company, you better get ready for some trouble
- katasourcing 9y agoAny cases to elaborate? I know one from U.S., when Huawei was going to enter US markets.
- Monotoko 9y agoI actually work inside China in tech, it's not too bad if you're a foreigner serving mostly foreign companies who come into China. Once you start dealing with larger local companies though the politics begins.
- catmanjan 9y agoOr for example, there is any free text user input that could be subversive...
- jonmaim 9y agoAny content hosted outside China is very slow for chinese users. So if you're serious about serving content in Mainland China, you will first need to obtain an ICP license. Only then you will be able to use the Mainland CDN and cloud instances.
- redthrowaway 9y agoAnd pretty much everything useful is blocked. We rolled out an update that broke our app for all of China, because cloudfront was blocked. That was a new one for me. Having spent a painfully slow 10 hours in the airport in Beijing let me appreciate just how much of the Internet breaks when you block the biggest sites. Serve up jQuery through googleapis.com? Not in China, you don't. Hope it wasn't doing any heavy lifting for you.
- chrischen 9y ago> And pretty much everything useful is blocked Anything useful for foreigners. Their policy is more about protectionism than censorship.
- yinhm 9y agoThis is just plain wrong. CCP only cares about steal wealth from ppl and shut everyone that tell the truth. This: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO3pO3ykAUybrjv3RBbXEHw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO3pO3ykAUybrjv3RBbXEHw , and this: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/13/world/asia/liu-xiaobo-dead.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/13/world/asia/liu-xiaobo-dea... , etc, etc. The truth and the political dissidents voices is what they really afraid of.
- pducks32 9y agoThat is categorically false. Chinese communism is strongly influenced by nationalism and protectionism comes from that but make no mistake that their goal is censorship.
- chrischen 9y agoThey could easily force foreign companies to operate under a strong censorship regime if that were their main goal. Facebook basically bends to the will of every market it operates in. However they clearly prefer local startups and makes it generally difficult for foreign companies to purely exploit the Chinese market. Joint ventures are always required at the least.
- normanjoyner 9y agothis is definitely a valid concern. decoupling automation from your cloud provider, moving it a layer up the stack, and leveraging only IaaS, can actually be quite helpful in these scenarios. this is an area where having a multicloud strategy, or minimally the ability to move between clouds at will, is essential.
- mrep 9y agoyep! My company will never trust any chinese company with anything especially our data.
- visarga 9y agoOnly Google and Amazon are safe, they don't show data even to FBI /s
- gonyea 9y agoObviously the FBI and the Chinese Government are equally untrustworthy. Who can truly say that one is worse than the other? /s
- anonicasjuly 9y agoDepends where you live.
- zghst 9y agoChinese citizens shouldn’t trust American products too much and vice versa. At least your homeland will protect you and you know your people.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago> At least your homeland will protect you and you know your people. This holds neither for the USA nor china.
- pducks32 9y agoI don’t really see how that is true. Censorship means getting your own citizens in trouble so that doesn’t really work out and you only need turn on the news to see how the U.S. can poorly protect their citizens.
- pluma 9y agoThe US won't "protect Americans" if by that you mean "not violate their rights and abuse their data", but that's beside the point. I'm neither Chinese nor American. While it's obvious why China is not trustworthy (i.e. rampant product piracy) the bar is not so high that it matters whether the Americans or the Chinese are abusing my customers' data as long as there's a third option. Granted, even when hosting locally it's known that American agencies might be able to access that data and it would be prudent to assume China (or Russia, seeing how they're the more trendy Big Bad these days) couldn't do the same. But at least I'm not wrapping everything up with a ribbon and leaving it at their doorstep.
- jameslk 9y agoMeanwhile billions of dollars are traded in Alibaba stock through the Cayman Islands on the NYSE. Somehow that hasn't led to much trepidation.
- Waterluvian 9y agoI have that concern about AWS and other American hosting, too.
- croisillon 9y agoI have a related concerns about customer protection, maybe someone knows about it and can tell me: the famous Chinese bike-sharing companies are now coming everywhere in US & Europe. How "dangerous" (at least privacy-wise) is it to use them (i.e. give them your contact and bank data)?
- aembleton 9y agoI signed up a couple of weeks ago to Mobike, and so far it's worked well. I've given them my credit card details, which should provide me with some protection. If I was really paranoid I'd use a prepaid card like my Monzo card. At some point I'll look at what data it is sending out, and how often. Many people have Chinese apps on their phones as many utilities in the Play store originate there. If you watch where they're communicating to you can see that it is Beijing. Just as most apps talk to various servers in the US.
- devopsproject 9y agoThey are required by Chinese law to track you: http://www.loc.gov/law/foreign-news/article/china-cyberspace-administration-releases-new-rules-on-mobile-apps/ http://www.loc.gov/law/foreign-news/article/china-cyberspace... I'd uninstall any chinese made app if you care about privacy