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Eric Schmidt predicts that Internet will bifurcate between China and USA

37 points by kevmo 8y ago

sverige 8y ago
I wonder if Google will split in two as well. TFA refers to the internal controversy over their willingness to censor in order to please the Chinese government. Unsurprising, but only time will tell if it will be profitable.
- adventured 8y ago
  I think Google will actually split into more than two. Most likely the anti-trust heat out of the EU will become aggressive enough, and the rules in the US vs EU will increasingly be different enough, that the only thing that will make sense is to fully separate off a Google EU as an independent business. It's very plausible this will be the pattern for Facebook and Amazon as well given time. The divisions will then compete with each other globally. The EU will never catch up to the US in tech as things are now, so they'll continue to turn the screws until it becomes nigh unworkable to operate in their market if you're a US tech giant like Google. That will leave one good choice (to preserve shareholder value): split off Google EU. It's the last thing Google will want to do, they ultimately won't have a choice, other than to abandon the EU market. Influential nationalist politicians in the EU view these giants as a sort of foreign invasion, the ramping negative response won't finally subside until you give them a Google EU that they can treat as their own. It'll be like the baby bells.
trelliscoded 8y ago
It's already bifurcated. I have to build everything for our US based website three times: once for China, once for Russia, and once for everywhere else. It's annoying, but there's no way I'm putting our backend data in China or Russia.
londons_explore 8y ago
It almost has. Very few big US services are accessible or usable in China. Very few Chinese services are widely used in the USA.
mindcrash 8y ago
And what about Europe? Or does he also predict that all US based services will be fully compliant with EU law (GDPR, Article 11, Article 13) by then?
stevenicr 8y ago
I was suggesting that cloudflare should consider doing this a couple days ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18022586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18022586 It seems to me that so many rules from different places make totally centralized possibly censored to all by whatever lowest possible denominator. Wasn't there a ruling for (maybe Canada?) right to be forgotten needs to be worldwide search results (not just censored in country where order was made for google to removed something from it's listings)? There are now so many groups that want things removed from the net for so many reasons. It also seems to me that the needle for what gets removed and what does not and who can direct someone to remove something - it's just gotten outta hand.

37 points by kevmo 8y ago

I wonder if Google will split in two as well. TFA refers to the internal controversy over their willingness to censor in order to please the Chinese government. Unsurprising, but only time will tell if it will be profitable.

adventured 8y ago
I think Google will actually split into more than two. Most likely the anti-trust heat out of the EU will become aggressive enough, and the rules in the US vs EU will increasingly be different enough, that the only thing that will make sense is to fully separate off a Google EU as an independent business. It's very plausible this will be the pattern for Facebook and Amazon as well given time. The divisions will then compete with each other globally. The EU will never catch up to the US in tech as things are now, so they'll continue to turn the screws until it becomes nigh unworkable to operate in their market if you're a US tech giant like Google. That will leave one good choice (to preserve shareholder value): split off Google EU. It's the last thing Google will want to do, they ultimately won't have a choice, other than to abandon the EU market. Influential nationalist politicians in the EU view these giants as a sort of foreign invasion, the ramping negative response won't finally subside until you give them a Google EU that they can treat as their own. It'll be like the baby bells.

trelliscoded 8y ago

It's already bifurcated. I have to build everything for our US based website three times: once for China, once for Russia, and once for everywhere else. It's annoying, but there's no way I'm putting our backend data in China or Russia.

londons_explore 8y ago

It almost has. Very few big US services are accessible or usable in China. Very few Chinese services are widely used in the USA.

mindcrash 8y ago

And what about Europe? Or does he also predict that all US based services will be fully compliant with EU law (GDPR, Article 11, Article 13) by then?

stevenicr 8y ago

I was suggesting that cloudflare should consider doing this a couple days ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18022586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18022586 It seems to me that so many rules from different places make totally centralized possibly censored to all by whatever lowest possible denominator. Wasn't there a ruling for (maybe Canada?) right to be forgotten needs to be worldwide search results (not just censored in country where order was made for google to removed something from it's listings)? There are now so many groups that want things removed from the net for so many reasons. It also seems to me that the needle for what gets removed and what does not and who can direct someone to remove something - it's just gotten outta hand.