
China state paper urges Internet rethink to gag foes - UniIsland
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/02/us-china-internet-idUSTRE78110S20110902
======
ender7
This kind of uncertainty (will the government suddenly decide that my product
is unworthy?) and lack of protection (copycat products will instantly abound)
seems like it greatly discourages foreign investment in China. But...do they
need it? China seems content for the moment to simply copy everything else the
world does and create a China-only version of it. They have a large enough
population that they don't really _need_ anyone else.

Every time I think about what a great, untapped market China is, I'm reminded
of what they did to World of Warcraft when it entered there:

[http://news.mmosite.com/content/2009-07-29/20090729175936714...](http://news.mmosite.com/content/2009-07-29/20090729175936714,1.shtml)

~~~
lobo_tuerto
You said it, it's a huge untapped market, and if you want a piece of it you
are going to abide by the rules imposed by the rule makers there. Just as in
everywhere else.

~~~
ender7
That's a false equivalence, though. China's "rules" are much worse than most
of the "everywhere else"s. Thus, they will continue to have trouble attracting
foreign investment.

Which is, perhaps, exactly how they want it.

------
UniIsland
let's see what's happening in china. a huge team merely for content censoring
is required if your website ever displays any user inputed text. that's why
china's twitter copycat companies have to employ several hundreds people(while
twitter has 2-digits employees), and quite often make their entire designing /
marketing department join the censoring team temporarily.

~~~
noste
While it doesn't invalidate your general point, Twitter has 600+ employees:
[http://blog.twitter.com/2011/08/your-world-more-
connected.ht...](http://blog.twitter.com/2011/08/your-world-more-
connected.html)

~~~
UniIsland
update on the numbers, i just searched google and found that sina weibo
recruited 1000+ people in march 2011. i was being a little bit too
conservative in the first place. cant really estimate how many they've
employed since then.

------
awflick
Perhaps some in China are not familiar with the wine bottle and how hard it is
to put the cork back in.

~~~
VengefulCynic
Actually, the argument from the reactionaries in the article is very much
aware that it's hard to go back and add censorship after services launch.
Their argument is that before allowing any services to launch, censorship
tools and suppression capabilities need to be already in place.

~~~
dublinclontarf
They already are in place, the only thing that will work is having all content
that is published being approved first. Good luck with that.

