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Hasn't China already gone halfway to that by putting up the Great Firewall and strongly funding local "copycats" of many companies that were founded and based i
by msandford 6y ago
Hasn't China already gone halfway to that by putting up the Great Firewall and strongly funding local "copycats" of many companies that were founded and based in the US?
I'm not suggesting that what the US is planning is good! I think it's not great. But it doesn't seem to be a pre-emptive thing that's being done.
- FooBarWidget 6y agoWhy should it matter whether China does it, in the decision of whether any other countries should do it? I thought we are supposed to support liberal values even when times get tough.
- DarkWiiPlayer 6y agoHave you even read the second paragraph before responding?
- The_rationalist 6y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
- pinkfoot 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_standard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_standard
- addicted 6y agoAlso, the idea that times are tough for the US when it has the largest GDP it ever had, a consistent share of the US economy (which has been stable for the last many decades) and bigger and richer companies than ever is kind of laughable. Yes, lately the US has struggled to distribute that wealth domestically. But that’s not Chinas fault and scapegoating them Will not fox that problem.
- zepto 6y agoThere is ample evidence that China’s GDP has overtaken the US on any real measure. And the idea that jobs that were formerly done in the US have not been exported to China is ludicrous.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- erklik 6y agoFrom a non-developed world viewpoint, is it even possible for China/India etc to have there companies grow to such a massive size to rival Facebook, Micrisoft etc without protecting them from multi-nationals with way more immense power and the capacity to simply buy companies? Ala, Facebook bought Instagram. If there was no such restriction, could they not have just bought Tencent in its infancy? Essentially ensuring that currently countries that have not developed will continually never develop.
- dragonelite 6y agoJust look at the EU and you have your answer about protecting your young markets.
- f6v 6y agoAnd the answer is that there’s nothing to rival Facebook, Google, etc. in Europe. Save for Yandex in Russia.
- catalogia 6y agoI think we'd all be better off in the long run if the EU did more to hobble American tech companies operating in the EU. Well, all except shareholders of those companies.
- lihan 6y agoMost country have this sort of control, there will be censorship at some level. Also, China did not ban US companies, but requires all foreign companies abide Chinese laws when operate in China. Apple have setup their data centre in China, iCloud is not banned. Similar story to Bing search, AWS, Azure etc..
- jiofih 6y agoThere are only a handful of countries that restrict internet access: China, Lydia, Egypt, Myanmar, Russia, maybe a few others. All authoritarian regimes to some extent. > China did not ban US companies Blocking domains via a countrywide firewall is as close as you get to “banning”. If it was about following laws you’d enforce that through legal means like everyone else, and not brute force.
- lihan 6y agoI’m here more refer to the internet censorship. Eg, they do exist in Australia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Austral...), Japan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Japan) etc..
- dannyw 6y agoAustralian internet censorship requires court orders at least.
- oasisbob 6y ago> There are only a handful of countries that restrict internet access I agree with the thrust of your general argument, but feel it necessary to point out that the list of countries with substantial and automatic filtering mechanisms is much larger than that. Eg, I've experienced censorship in Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and India. Legal means can still involve brute force; for example, when a court somewhere decides that a certain type of content is abhorrent and should be put on an automatic DNS blacklist that ISPs are required to use. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_surveillance_by_country https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_surv...
- jiofih 6y agoIt is pre-emptive since the danger of Chinese apps is still hypothetical (and cyber attacks are way more relevant to national security than consumer apps anyway).
- dannyw 6y agoConsider it economic protectionism; not national security. China will not let western companies succeed and compete fairly. Thus, companies with access to both Chinese and USA markets (ie those from China) have a huge advantage.
- fakeslimshady 6y agoNot true. You heard of Tesla? Its doing quite well and has majority stake. Things have gotten lot better but it been buried under the propaganda
- seanmcdirmid 6y agoSo Facebook and google are unblocked now? Reddit? Quora? The internet situation isn’t getting better, if anything it is getting worse: China keeps improving their anti-VPN tech and the GFW is bound to include Hong Kong in the near future.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cblconfederate 6y agobut china did not split anything, it was never a part of the internet to begin with. I certainly dont remember ever visiting a chinese site
- orbital-decay 6y agoDo you even speak Mandarin, to begin with? Chinese segment was a normal part of the Internet till the second half of 2000s. Baidu in particular was a competitive search engine, and another dotcom crash survivor, along with Yandex, Google, Yahoo etc.
- cblconfederate 6y agoIf we re talking about the chinese-speaking internet then what's the point of talking about "splitting"? Splitting implies that international users used it, and now don't.
- m4x 6y agoIt makes more sense to use splitting to refer to access, rather than use. No group anywhere uses all of the www, but in the past all groups at least had the option of doing so. Edit: it was probably a much more significant change from the Chinese point of view than the Western one, since propertionally more Chinese speak English and browse English sites than Westerners speak Mandarin and browse Chinese sites.
- discordance 6y agoRocket Internet, an old-ish tech company in Europe, makes its living off cloning And localizing US startup ideas before the US equivalent makes it to Europe. They’ve been doing it for years now. I guess the diff is that Europe is still an open market as opposed to China.
- jariel 6y agoMaking clones is not a material part of this equation. It happens everywhere. But when a nation puts up barriers to trade, and grabs IP, then the government themselves back companies, using control of their nationalised banks and central bank - then it takes on a different form entirely. Everything happening is a bit predictable.
- netcan 6y agoSure. The new new part here is that the US has come around to the chinese point of view, to some extent... and for much of the same reasons. Deng Xiaping's famous line during the chinese market reform era was "If you open the window, both fresh air and flies will be blown in." The "fresh air" was a market economy, trade with western economies, even cultural liberalisation... as long as they weren't dangerous to the regime. They were still dubious of ideological capitalism, at its height in the 80s & 90s... but willing to compromise. They weren't willing to compromise on free press, speech, association, etc.. Those are the flies. They were not about to let them in. The ccp felt entirely vindicated when the USSR collapsed, and doubly so by the 90s, when China's economy was obviously booming. Communist economics could be binned while maintaining chinese communism in all other realms. Liberal ideologists were wrong. Anyway... by the time the www got big, this new version of chinese communism was mature, successful and confident. Google, wikipedia, later facebook... these are politically potent, and dangerous. The internet would influence political opinions. It would be exploited by foreign intelligence. It would harbour dissent, and dissent would grow into revolt... the ccp had no control of it. Besides politics, there were other issues. Economics, of course. Why not reserve these markets for chinese companies? Information security, espionage and other intelligence adjacent issues. The ccp were correct on all points and the last decades proved it. The arab spring. Many elections worldwide, notably the 2016 US presidential. Prism. Flat earthers. $trn market caps. The ticktok backlash. All proof that Deng was right. Political potency. Intelligence potency. Economic potency. All too potent to stay hands off. Back to the US... The US has basically come around to all these positions. Regardless of why Zuck is called to testify in congress, congressmen are most interested in political potency. Are you favouring my opponent's party more than mine? Is foreign intelligence operating on your platform? US intelligence treats domestic internet companies as an asset, and foreign ones as adversaries. There isn't even much veneer anymore. The economics also play, of course. It gets danced around for narrative/ideological reasons... but it's foolish to think the US would be neutral about Amazon's success vis a vis Alibaba. In essence, the Dengist position has been adopted in the US. The internet americans access must be american controlled. Political reasons first. Intelligence reasons second. Economic reasons quitely.
- matthewdgreen 6y ago> The ccp were correct on all points and the last decades proved it. .. The arab spring. Many elections worldwide, notably the 2016 US presidential. Prism. Flat earthers. In the short term this might be true. But any view that holds non-democratic authoritarianism up as a superior long-term approach has to grapple with the fact that open societies have systematically outperformed authoritarian ones over the past century. This is in the face of world war, revolutions, and developments in communications technology that destabilized entire political movements. Protests and electoral chaos are bad things, and new communications technologies can make them more destabilizing. But the ability to peacefully avoid something like 25 years of Maoism is worth an immeasurable amount of short-term chaos. We should be a little bit careful before we copy the Chinese approach.