

China bans Twitter - arjungmenon
http://features.csmonitor.com/globalnews/2009/06/02/twitter-silenced-in-china-ahead-of-tiananmen-anniversary/

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jjs
You know you've made it when you're banned in China.

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Retric
I wonder what China would do if we started randomly banning products from
China for a few days at a time?

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va_coder
How can we call this Free Trade when one side has open access to markets and
the other side can doesn't.

Anybody ever manage a popular Web site that goes black for days? People forget
about the web site, the momentum is gone, and you lose a lot of business.

There is nothing fair about our trade policies. This is a big part of what
America does - create information systems, and it's not fair that China can
block it with no good reason.

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raganwald
People asked the same question about Japan in the 70s and 80s. Japanese
products like cars were over here, but it was almost impossible to sell a
North American product in Japan.

But people voted for politicians who give them access to the goods they want
to buy without worrying about nuänces on international trade disputes.

If we shut Wal-Mart down and blocked Honda from selling cars here, there would
be an outcry.

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ivankirigin
It was a very good thing for the US that we didn't have restrictions on
imports. That's why trade negotiations are so backwards, if you look at them
from a consumer perspective: "I'll hurt my people less, but only IF you also
hurt your people less".

Access to better cars is good. The small, small minority of people in an
individual industry hurt by more competition should react like any of us would
in the things we build: try to build something better.

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raganwald
Are you saying that as long as our consumers want whatever they're selling, we
shouldn't worry about whether they permit our companies to do business with
their consumers?

Let's get around the argument about crappy vs. good products and talk about
two fairly competent companies. If Canada refuses to allow Boeing to sell
aircraft to Canadian airlines, is it still ok for Bombardier to sell aircraft
to US airlines?

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ivankirigin
It doesn't really matter if our consumers want what they're selling. That's
not the government's job to decide what consumers want.

But, yes, we should permit companies owned by people outside the US to sell
things to people in the US, regardless of any policies in other countries.

Would you rather have better planes for all Americans, or slightly higher
profits for a single company? It turns out it is almost always huge numbers of
domestic consumers vs. a very small number of domestic suppliers, and NOT
natives vs. foreigners as the suppliers would like us to believe. Also,
foreign companies often employ very many people in the US, which means the
labor interest component of the issue is very often blurred.

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nathanwdavis
A few years back China was banning certain Google web properties. Then once
Baidu.com got its feet off the ground and with some government subsidy became
the more popular search engine in China, they un-did the blocking of those
Google sites. I wonder why?

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fbailey
yes there is going to be a a very succesful chinese twitter clone ,no doubt
about it ... probably with a little more delay built in ...

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known
And to bypass Internet Censorship <http://www.zensur.freerk.com/>

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chanux
Anything they forgot to ban?

