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Akamai to shut down its CDN operations in China
- l1n 2y agohttps://www.akamai.com/newsroom/press-release/akamai-announces-intent-to-achieve-fedramp-high-and-dod-impact-levels-4-and-5-accreditations https://www.akamai.com/newsroom/press-release/akamai-announc... related
- bdcravens 2y agoIs it? I'm not familiar enough with those certifications to know if that requires them to divest of their offerings in China.
- hlieberman 2y agoIt’s not. They’ve held FedRAMP certifications for more than a decade. Source: ex-Akamai InfoSec employee
- thaumasiotes 2y agoThe requirements of the certification might change for political reasons.
- hlieberman 2y agoThat's not something that's currently planned, and even if it did, it would take years. Besides, it wouldn't apply anyway; Akamai's China business was already routed through a mainland China company, as required by Chinese law.
- thaumasiotes 2y agoIt generally takes a long time to change the text of a formal requirement. Changing the meaning of the existing text doesn't take so long.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> Akamai to shut down its CDN operations in China ...and continue offering the same service by reselling Tencent's CDN. Looks like they're making this one of the things in China that has to be provided locally?
- wordofx 2y agoThey don’t want foreign businesses having a solid foothold in the country.
- toomuchtodo 2y agoControl is important during both global decoupling and potential geopolitical conflict (Taiwan).
- khana 2y ago[dead]
- kittikitti 2y agoThis can often occur when parts of the application are out of their control. For example, geographical apps are hard to recreate locally on the scale of Google or Apple Maps. It's vastly easier and sometimes cheaper to use their API. But if China has any disputes on how it's represented in the geo data, the software becomes a liability.
- flaminHotSpeedo 2y agoMore likely Tencent will own the land and physical infrastructure but it will still be Akamai software operated by Akamai employees.
- ghaff 2y agoI see a lot of US organizations decoupling stuff from China, especially if it's fairly peripheral, such as pulling back from running events there. But there's also a lot of more fundamental second-sourcing and the like.
- talldayo 2y agoThe writing has been on the wall for over a decade, at this point. The only companies that "risk it" with China are the ones that rely on borderline (or in some cases, literal) slave labor to maintain their margins. If you don't have an outstanding manufacturing investment to honor, it's a net-negative reliance in many cases.
- robinjhuang 2y agoCanva has a great presence in China.
- alephnerd 2y agoCanva is Australian though.
- azinman2 2y agoStill foreign.
- alephnerd 2y agoTrue, but Australia and China have extremely close economic relations due to proximity and an FTA.
- t-3 2y agoThat's a pretty one-way relationship though. Australia and China are literally thousands of miles away from each other, but China is still important to Australia because all the continental landmasses are far from Australia.
- DrWhax 2y agoCurious if Cloudflare will follow
- DenseComet 2y agoCloudflare’s China presence is already operated by a local company, like what Akamai is switching to. https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-partners-with-jd-cloud/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-partners-with-jd-clou...
- crystaln 2y agoChina never has and never will offer a level playing field for non-Chinese companies. The US is finally starting to act in kind, and should continue to do so.
- declan_roberts 2y agoFair trade. It's amazing it took us until Trump to make this a major agenda item.
- azinman2 2y agoAnd yet he’s not blocking TikTok. It’s quite astonishing given: A) they’re a Chinese owned company B) China asymmetrically has never allowed US social media (amongst practically all major internet properties) C) We cap ownership of foreign owners of US media. TikTok IS TV for the young generation. But apparently he thinks it helped him win (would love to know if that was actually true, which is probably impossible to calculate), so who cares about all these other principles!
- wkat4242 2y agoD) It was him who started the whole discussion of banning TikTok in the first place
- bee_rider 2y agoI thought he asked the court to pause the ban until he was in office. In the interest of trying to be neutral, perhaps he either: * Thinks he can help negotiate some sort of deal that keeps TikTok here fairly, or * Sees an opportunity to do a grift/accept some bribes from ByteDance/get some control over an effective propaganda engine.
- iamacyborg 2y ago* wants the publicity from being the president to ban them
- GabensIntern 2y agoAkamai is also a CDN that [works for domain fronting][1], which is an amazingly reliable way to get around the Chinese Firewall via [Collateral Freedom][2]. Tor's meek used Azure for domain fronting. Akamai likely faced some pressure from the govt because of this. [1]: https://github.com/vysecurity/DomainFrontingLists/blob/master/Akamai.txt https://github.com/vysecurity/DomainFrontingLists/blob/maste... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_freedom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_freedom
- dilyevsky 2y agoWith fastly stopping df last year and cloudflare a while before that it seems like tor/snowflake options are dwindling fast
- eh_why_not 2y ago> All current China CDN customers must complete the transition to our Partners’ solution by June 30, 2026... Can anyone here who works in the field shed some light on why it takes a whole 1.5 years for such a change to take effect? What's involved in a CDN transition that can't be done in, say, 6 months?
- jpollock 2y agoVendor validation alone can take months, and that's before you start the technical process of migrating. This is a company who is in front of your business, do you trust them? I expect a lot of businesses will take the opportunity to send the contract out for tender.
- wafflerewire 2y agoMy enterprise sized day job is an Akamai customer. Nothing in China directly so we won't be directly impacted. As a hypothetical, if we got told that we had to switch providers to stay in a region, we'd need to rebuild pipelines, EdgeWorkers, edge caching rules, origin routing configurations and probably more I'm not aware of. Plus testing all of those changes in a non-breaking way across the entire enterprise. Along with all the normal business delivery priorities. It'd probably take a solid year for us to fully execute it.
- viraptor 2y agoThere's also a finance process. Akamai deals mostly with enterprise customers, which means step 1 may be technical validation, but step 2 is negotiating an appropriate contract with another provider, which may take weeks on its own without a clear go/no-go answer in the meantime.
- biesnecker 2y agoThis. People tend not to realize how sprawling enterprise software stacks tend to be, how many implicit dependencies have to be untangled, etc. Even simple things can take years and complicated things often just don’t get done at all.
- kayewiggin 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- j45 2y agoInternet and CDNs has unique restrictions and requirements in China. Not everyone will want to play ball.
- animitronix 2y agoGood, no US company should have ever been doing business in China
- xyst 2y agoDoes this also mean exploiting their cheap/slave labor for manufacturing and importing materials is also off the table? Very naive to think the incoming US administration would do anything to help the middle class. He sold voters as “America first”, yet his actions speak for the billionaire class.
- Jcampuzano2 2y agoIn an ideal world the answer to your question is yes, we should not be exploiting slave wages/labor. But most of us are simply not in the position to make that decision. And the webs of manufacturing middlemen make it difficult to even know at what point in the chain would this practice be happening. Not to mention the average person would see nothing more than prices going up and complain with 0 knowledge of whats happening downstream
- fnqi8ckfek 2y ago[dead]
- cyp0633 2y agoI remember the days when jsDelivr suddenly lost its ICP licence, and therefore got an immediate ban in China Mainland. It used to be a really reliable CDN service for both China and abroad. Then it suddenly failed. PS: China now allows foreign entities to run CDNs, ISPs and IDCs in specific cities, starting from Apr 2024. This could be because something else.
- Havoc 2y agoWas there a regulatory change? Gitlab also recently pulled out
- RandyOrion 2y agoInterestingly, gitlab.com is pulling out from China, too.
- almaight 2y agogitlab.cn
- ksec 2y agoFortunately Akamai is still operating in Hong Kong and not pulling out. Unlike Gitlab which pulls out of whole Hong Kong and China.
- 052c7028e 2y agoI worked on the censorship and government reporting (sending all logs) infrastructure for Akamai China CDN. I'm glad to see it get shut down. Happy to answer questions. Previous discussion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33678019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33678019
- thedevilslawyer 2y agoThanks for the offer - would like to understand: 1. How was working with China requests and logging, differing from working with other nation states? 2. Was there full services brought up only for China specific needs? What would they take care or? 3. How would any blocks work? allowlist or denylist? Was takedown immediate, or was it working with the customer/client and getting them to take it down within SLA?
- 052c7028e 2y ago1. At the time it was the only nation state that had specialty infrastructure except for maybe the US. 2. There were specific infrastructure changes made for blocking and sending logs inside mainland china. 3. The CDN node would deny access to specific urls uploaded by the Chinese partner company. I don't remember the SLA. The SLA for reporting visited URLs was 15m IIRC
- jimmydoe 2y agoThanks for the disclosure. Don’t feel too bad, those stuff you helped built may not cause much damage as you feared. CDN used to be at the front line of blocking content and surveillance citizens, nowadays that happens mostly thru social networks. Unlike other countries, Chinese citizens are ultra online, and mostly concentrated on two platforms Webo and Wechat. Most other online services all require authentication via either of these two, plus cellphone number. So for govt it’s very simple to block anything or see any identity, CDN hardly play any major role anymore.
- CheyiLin 2y agoA friend mentioned this a few weeks ago during a conversation with someone in the industry. Apparently, it’s because the China government directly mandated it, so Akamai had no choice but to transfer their business to domestic China providers. For example, PSN is now being handled by Tencent.
- usr1106 2y agoEdited submission title to get more clicks? The original title is "Entering strategic partnerships in China".
- flomwillow 2y agoBravo to Akamai. We should not compromise our values to fit the Chinese dictatorship’s whims. Business is more than just money, it must be. China demands full populace control, end to end, and that’s simply contrary to values of western societies. By Alamo making moves like this it enforces these principles within western governments as well- always remember it can change here, if we let it. Freedom is the most valuable thing in the world. Nothing matters more, and you won’t realize that until you’ve lost what you’ve lived with for these decades. So, no, fuck them. End our dependence on that country, starting now, and the world will prosper, and they may eventually follow our lead. China MUST NOT lead. We will be slaves, mark my words.