Sometimes, protection is about timing most of all. If you're "good enough" today, you might be able to develop significant marketshare and be able to prevent a

Sometimes, protection is about timing most of all. If you're "good enough" today, you might be able to develop significant marketshare and be able to prevent a better, but later competitor from developing momentum. I wouldn't be surprised if many of the successes of American internet companies abroad are that way. They have the scale to drop a basically complete product on a new market overnight. It may not be perfectly designed for local tastes and needs, but it's good enough and nobody local who comes later is going to have the economic muscle to compete with Google/Amazon/whatever. Over time, they might gradually get the right product, but there's no priority if you're already an unchallenged #1. With protectionism, local competitors can make a case for investment and long-term thinking. If you know that the foreign competitors are going to be hamstrung, you have the breathing room to spend the extra effort to build the right product. I suspect both Yandex and Baidu benefitted from this type of protectionism and evolved into successful businesses of their own, who can now compete on their better product-market fit. In a cutthroat market, would they have lasted 12 rounds with a localized Google?