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As long as China isn't breaking any WTO rules, they are free to block internet services and apps. If other countries aren't happy with this, they should change
by intrasight 9y ago
As long as China isn't breaking any WTO rules, they are free to block internet services and apps. If other countries aren't happy with this, they should change the WTO rules. If WTO rules are being broke, then clearly those rules have no teeth.
Why would China block things? Various excellent reasons are discussed in this thread, and they all boil down to political and commercial.
Are the Chinese people harmed? I would argue not. None of these "services" do anything really important nor irreplaceable. Most are just new spins on ancient tech like email and FTP, and the new versions that are blocked don't really have any differentiating features compared to what is available locally. The feature that is new is Digital Identity.
And so my final thought is that they are playing a long game with respect to digital identity - which is the long game of most of these blocked services. In Cyberspace, am I going to be Chinese or American? I aM not Chinese, but I expect that most Chinese will want to also be Chinese in Cyberspace, and so the Chinese government is fulfilling that desire.
- kcanini 9y agoThe Chinese people are harmed if any end-to-end encrypted communications services are blocked to ensure the government is able to spy on them.
- intrasight 9y agoIf you want secure communication then you have to use your own secure channel. That is true everywhere.
- nick32m 9y agoYou do know that Wechat's chat history stored in Tencent's database in plain text? The authorisation could check/monitor any Chinese citizen who uses Wechat, if they say something bad about the government or spread the rumours of some officials corruptions, they will be in big trouble?!? How do you mean Chinese people are not harmed? Their privacy is absolutely harmed and they have less choices for chatting and that's what the Chinese government wants - they want everyone in China to use Wechat so they could absolutely control/monitor
- intrasight 9y agoI wouldn't use WhatsApp or Wechat or any of these spyware apps. The Chinese government isn't taking something away (privacy, freedom) because it was never granted. Therefore I say "no harm". If the people want these rights, they will have to reform their government.
- usaar333 9y agoWechat claims they don't hold logs on disk: http://help.wechat.com/cgi-bin/micromsg-bin/oshelpcenter?opcode=2&id=150915Ev6NF3150915fYRraQ&lang=en&plat=android&Channel=helpcenter http://help.wechat.com/cgi-bin/micromsg-bin/oshelpcenter?opc...