Maybe China Did Something Alright

Recently China blocked access to more websites. However, they did not block them individually. China blocked access to websites by blocking Content Delivery Networks, which serve as general “gateways” to thousands of websites and apps.

I disagree with this. However, I read some of the comments on Hacker News, and one in particular stood out to me.

“Speaking entirely divorced from my opinion on China politically (as someone with strong US and TW ties, FWIW), I think the Great Firewall has been a brilliant economic move in retrospect. While it may have been an accidental side-effect, blocking so many foreign sites has enabled a flourishing of domestic internet companies of the likes that nobody but the US has seen unless I'm mistaken.”

I'm for net neutrality, and I believe China is actively censoring their internet. However, this viewpoint kind of changed my way of thinking about the situation. Imagine this: Today, China lowers it's “Great Internet Firewall”, and becomes open. The government comes out as saying “Hey guys, sorry about that, but really we wanted to foster some local companies and the only way to do that was to block the internet for a few years. We tried not to block too many sites and it seems to have worked. But now we'll be more open. We made a cost-benefit analysis and it'll really help our country if we censor the internet a little bit for a little time”.

If that happened, a lot of people would be pretty confused. But would you be mad at China? In the time that China was censoring the internet many Chinese versions of American companies came to power. Arguably, the internet was a big race of companies to get a product out first. Amazon and Google are examples of this. If China wants to be an international power on the web, they had to do something drastic to keep these companies from moving in and taking over.

If I were a software engineer in China, and this happened, I'd likely be better off than if it did not happen. It's almost like the internet version of an import tax, which doesn't sound too bad.

The counterpoint would be China is not censoring the internet for this reason. However, if China did want to, all they would need to do was greatly slow down internet traffic from outside.

This post might be a little rambly, but I'm kind of in shock because somebody changed my opinion with an internet comment which I didn't know could happen.

I might be making light of a serious situation I don't understand.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8622331