4 ms·

I think that, at least for "internet startups", the Great Firewall will be a Great Impediment to creating a healthy ecosystem.

edwinyzh 12y ago
I'm not sure if we can all it a healthy ecosystem, but I guess most IT people here in China will agree with me that, while the Great Fire Wall's original purpose should be purely political censorship, it actually helped the growth of the Google-clone, the youtube-clone, the twitter-clone, and most other clones in this country, because the massive majority of the my fellow countrymen cannot access those original websites.
nothrabannosir 12y ago
Quite the opposite: it creates huge demand for local copies of foreign services that are unreachable from within it. It's the protectionist's dream. Foreign websites are, as a rule, very badly reachable from within the country. I don't even want to use them personally, let alone build a business on them.
- bigphishy 12y ago
  An obvious perspective that I had not realized..
- adventured 12y ago
  This is a non-issue. As an example, the rest of the world hasn't mass-adopted Baidu and isn't going to. The same has and will go for most of China's services. Baidu is heavily shielded from external competition due to both nationalism and government controls (censorship etc). A protectionist's dream? No, a trapped nightmare, they can never compete properly with Google on a global scale. Seeing as China represents about 10-12% of global GDP, Baidu will never derive a meaningful business from perhaps 3/4 of the global economy accordingly. Live by censorship, die by censorship.
  - rgbrenner 12y ago
    a trapped nightmare I can access Baidu from the US... but they clearly aren't trying to get my traffic -- the site is in mandarin. So I don't understand why you think they're trapped... if they wanted to, they're free to expand outside of China.. there are few countries that have similar censorship.
    - tarikjn 12y ago
      Mandarin is a spoken/audible dialect, you meant to simply say Chinese.
      - rgbrenner 12y ago
        didn't know that.. thanks
  - soperj 12y ago
    Yeah but they may never have had a business to begin with without the protectionism. Case in point; where is all the other search engines from other countries that have no protectionist schemes?
    - IndianAstronaut 12y ago
      Yandex and Naver deserve a mention. In some cases, localism does triumph even without very heavy handed censorship.
      - jorgecastillo 12y ago
        Don't forget Seznam!
  - tlb 12y ago
    Baidu doesn't have an english-language site. That's different from trying to address the global market and failing.
- LiweiZ 12y ago
  Frankly speaking, it's just "肥水不流外人田" in Chinese, which probably means keeping profitable things in one's own farmland in English. We always presume the higher orders have almost the same goals with the country. However, it is not the case every time. Also, state-run investment in such a large scale will simply lead to just another massive misallocation of the investment. For many officers, it's another opportunity to wash those money and put into personal accounts.

edwinyzh 12y ago

I'm not sure if we can all it a healthy ecosystem, but I guess most IT people here in China will agree with me that, while the Great Fire Wall's original purpose should be purely political censorship, it actually helped the growth of the Google-clone, the youtube-clone, the twitter-clone, and most other clones in this country, because the massive majority of the my fellow countrymen cannot access those original websites.

nothrabannosir 12y ago

Quite the opposite: it creates huge demand for local copies of foreign services that are unreachable from within it. It's the protectionist's dream. Foreign websites are, as a rule, very badly reachable from within the country. I don't even want to use them personally, let alone build a business on them.

bigphishy 12y ago
An obvious perspective that I had not realized..
adventured 12y ago
This is a non-issue. As an example, the rest of the world hasn't mass-adopted Baidu and isn't going to. The same has and will go for most of China's services. Baidu is heavily shielded from external competition due to both nationalism and government controls (censorship etc). A protectionist's dream? No, a trapped nightmare, they can never compete properly with Google on a global scale. Seeing as China represents about 10-12% of global GDP, Baidu will never derive a meaningful business from perhaps 3/4 of the global economy accordingly. Live by censorship, die by censorship.
- rgbrenner 12y ago
  a trapped nightmare I can access Baidu from the US... but they clearly aren't trying to get my traffic -- the site is in mandarin. So I don't understand why you think they're trapped... if they wanted to, they're free to expand outside of China.. there are few countries that have similar censorship.
  - tarikjn 12y ago
    Mandarin is a spoken/audible dialect, you meant to simply say Chinese.
    - rgbrenner 12y ago
      didn't know that.. thanks
- soperj 12y ago
  Yeah but they may never have had a business to begin with without the protectionism. Case in point; where is all the other search engines from other countries that have no protectionist schemes?
  - IndianAstronaut 12y ago
    Yandex and Naver deserve a mention. In some cases, localism does triumph even without very heavy handed censorship.
    - jorgecastillo 12y ago
      Don't forget Seznam!
- tlb 12y ago
  Baidu doesn't have an english-language site. That's different from trying to address the global market and failing.
LiweiZ 12y ago
Frankly speaking, it's just "肥水不流外人田" in Chinese, which probably means keeping profitable things in one's own farmland in English. We always presume the higher orders have almost the same goals with the country. However, it is not the case every time. Also, state-run investment in such a large scale will simply lead to just another massive misallocation of the investment. For many officers, it's another opportunity to wash those money and put into personal accounts.