
When China Rules the Web - tareqak
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2018-08-13/when-china-rules-web
======
mirimir
Given what we know of the NSA's success at pwning much of the Internet, this
is an incredibly ironic piece of propaganda.

Indeed, I can't help but agree somewhat with Xi Jinping:

> Finally, China has promoted “cyber-sovereignty” as an organizing principle
> of Internet governance, in direct opposition to U.S. support for a global,
> open Internet. In Xi’s words, cyber-sovereignty represents “the right of
> individual countries to independently choose their own path of cyber
> development, model of cyber regulation and Internet public policies, and
> participate in international cyberspace governance on an equal footing.”
> China envisions a world of national Internets, with government control
> justified by the sovereign rights of states. It also wants to weaken the
> bottom-up, private-sector-led model of Internet governance championed by the
> United States and its allies, a model Beijing sees as dominated by Western
> technology companies and civil society organizations. Chinese policymakers
> believe they would have a larger say in regulating information technology
> and defining the global rules for cyberspace if the UN played a larger role
> in Internet governance. All four of Beijing’s priorities require China to
> act aggressively to shape cyberspace at home and on the global stage.

I mean, Brazil and other countries are pursuing "cyber-sovereignty". The EU's
GDPR is fundamentally that. As is Google's latest undersea cable.

I have always loved the cypherpunk vision of a sovereign Internet. But that's
very different from a US-dominated Internet, which is what we've had since the
start.

~~~
Treegarden
I lived in Shanghai for 6 months and the internet sucked more then the air and
thats when its hurting to take in a deep breath in winter. After returning to
Germany I was more happy about the free internet (and freedom of speech and so
on..) then about the clean air.

To me comparing China to the NSA (USA) is weak. As you wrote this, the current
top result on Reddit is this:
[https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/98el62/un_says_i...](https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/98el62/un_says_it_has_credible_reports_china_is_holding/?ref=share&ref_source=link)

I dont see the USA getting these kinds of headlines anytime soon. Moreover
China has earned critique for partially rolling out their citizen scoring.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System)
[https://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-
cr...](https://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-credit-score-
privacy-invasion)

I am not the biggest fan of the GDPR and its also tragic to me that Europe has
no real innovative internet companies. And as far as I know Brazil has some
big challenges with corruption so I wouldn't take its policies as a shining
example (not implying that you did though).

I kind of see the internet as my home and culture in many ways. I have met
Egyptians, Brazilians and Koreans that shared the same internet culture as me.
In contrast I have made much fewer friends in mainland China due to them not
using the same internet as me (and thus not having even remotely something in
common). They instead consume their own entertainment such as Chinese soap
operas which my mainland friends have told me are vastly inferior to their
western counterparts (not soap operas but entertainment and culture in
general). Finally the restricted access inhibits the development of better
English skills which further divides

I dont care much for visas or nation-sovereignty. I hope that we one day have
universal human right centered values based on an free internet and open
borders so that I am not limited in my pursuit of happiness by some arbitrary
political rule.

~~~
ronnier
I was in China for a week at the Amazon office. It was very jarring not able
to load google. Or YouTube. Or gmail. Or google maps. The list goes on and on.
Facebook won’t load. Even many vpns are blocked.

~~~
nradov
How does Amazon actually operate their China office? Don't they have a site-
to-site VPN back to the main corporate network for secure internal
communications?

~~~
ronnier
This was about two years ago and I don’t want to talk about internals too
much. But from the office I couldn’t load any google sites. I was able to
manually connect to the amazon vpn and reach google.

------
askaboutit
The line that internet sovereignty protects against mainly American tech is
false.

Japan. Indonesia. Germany. Australia. Malaysia. South Korea. Lots of countries
have had competition and have been able to have localized offerings that won
in a free market. But in China. There is no free market.

AWS might be the most prolific. Far better product but it’s useless in China
because it can’t be controlled. So China ends up with Alicloud a far inferior
product.

The US government is becoming increasingly more paranoid of itself too. The
smarter way is things like the EU are doing. Champion greater privacy for
local citizens with heavy laws and companies will fall in line. It’s soft
governance. You win on both fronts. Controlling data and championing human
rights. Closed fists win nothing. If China implemented local data laws with
extreme privacy measures Facebook would be forced to localize its offering and
keep all data in China whilst fixing a massive public image problem. But it
has nothing to do with that. The party is paranoid and will kill competition
to control data any day.

------
infinity0
Again, this country-vs-country bullshit propaganda.

The web is already less open from the efforts of US companies developing
massively centralised platforms like Google, Facebook, and so on, you're
familiar with the story. And they look very eager to play into the Chinese
government's rules for their own profit, whilst at the same time paying lip
service to liberal principles and internet principles of openness.

At the same time there's plenty of Chinese investment into decentralised
cryptocurrencies, probably more so than coming from US investment groups. Some
large western companies are doing more blockchain research for sure, but the
vast majority of them are only interested in those within the context of their
own centralised, privatised, permissioned systems.

Enough of this China vs US crap, your narrative is simply wrong. If you give a
shit about the open principles of the internet, talk about the actual projects
in reality actually trying to preserve these principles, and stop narrating
based on false political boundaries.

~~~
mistermann
How does Facebook, etc make the web less open?

~~~
hakfoo
It's displaced several competitive ecosystems.

Many of the things Facebook is used for were originally disparate services--
think of the smaller social groups that would have been mailing lists, or at
least message boards. Event management-- RSVPing and messaging participants--
used to be a fairly competitive space too.

If you need services in those spaces, and lack the technical skills to roll
everything from scratch-- but it doesn't fit with the Facebook model or
business tastes-- you've got far fewer options than you had 10 years ago.

I'm thinking, for example, a community I enjoyed many years ago. It was for
collaborative writing so most everyone posted under pen names. In 1998 it was
implemented by a mailing list which got cross-posted to a newsgroup. In 2005
it would have probably been thrown up on a cheap "hosted forum" service like
ProBoards. In 2018 it would be a Facebook group, and almost certainly stuck
with posting under real names. And that's the most benign "we lost something"
outcome I can picture.

~~~
mistermann
It's an odd situation, while anyone is certainly still _able_ to do any of
these things (openness), Facebook and their kind have largely made it a fool's
errand to even try. And I agree, the world has probably suffered more than we
can imagine (and you _have_ to imagine, what could have been). Yet, I think
even the most rabid anti-FB person would have a hard time making a case
they've broken any laws, at all.

And this is all distinct from the very serious free speech ( _not_ first
amendment) issues, which are another huge problem.

I wish instead of freaking out over the latest petty outrage du jour, our
societies would spend more time considering whether whether we might be going
down the wrong path in a variety of ways. All the same stuff we see on the
news day after day after day almost feels like cover fire.

------
ArtWomb
Not exactly the analysis of China's enormously diverse and energetic tech
landscape we deserve. In fact, sites like Technode, and even recent podcasts
from A16Z and HN have provided much more rigor. We simply need better
reporting on this essential beat: what Emily Chang and Bloomberg Tech provide
for Silicon Valley, but covering the Chinese mainland and HK.

Actual subtext of article at hand seems to be that the antagonistic strategy
by current US administration will lead not only to inevitable dominance of AI
technologies with a distinctly totalitarian flavor. But also perverse side
effects.

They may be imagining something like an Alibaba Cloud data center running in
Northern Virginia. It may include Party-inspired features such as "content
moderation" or "user prediction". Features far stricter than anything AWS or
GCloud would be willing or able to provide at similar price. US enterprises
(and government entities) themselves will be so tempted to implement these
strictures, the coming authoritarian dystopia is all but ensured.

The narrative clearly does not have to unfold this way. US and Chinese
entrepreneurs can and will forge amazing partnerships. On a recent web app I
noticed about 50% of posts in Chinese. And very much look forward to
localizing for the entire region.

~~~
hkai
I am skeptical about Chinese tech scene in the sense that Chinese government
views tech as a way to reinforce dictatorship, repression of minorities and
expand totalitarianism overseas, rather than to achieve something good.

Think AI to detect undesirable people or self-driving cars that take you
straight to the police station when requested, as well as pressure to restrict
freedoms in the West in order to appease the Chinese government or investors.

And as for partnerships, you may want to look at previous experience of
partnerships in the Hi-Tech manufacturing, like planes or military.

The partnerships only last for as long as needed to copy your technology and
start competing with you in your own market.

------
personjerry
> Already, more people in China have access to the Internet than in any other
> country...

Hold on, that's not exactly a fair comparison

~~~
_iyig
Why? The singular leverage of China’s massive, unified market and labor force
is what so many pro-liberty commentators find particularly troubling.

------
ngcc_hk
You have a chance vs you have none. Gone through monopoly like power such as
Microsoft, AOL, compu serve, Yahoo, the flower one (forget its name now),
Google ... do they do Facebook ...

The key is you can choose. You can start or not using it like young one quit
Facebook.

But can you not use wechat, ... etc in china. No.

You are really controlled by a country which close off its world.

Being in Hong Kong we face the pressure everyday. Strange you have comment
here cf USA controlled vs china controlled.

Really?

1984 is a hard novel. Suggest to Read animal farm. You know those pigs. And
not need to due with them face to face.

------
adventured
There's one rational counter to what China is pursuing.

Basically, the US/CA + EU + AU/NZ + JP/SK (among others).

There is no other way to restrain China's ambition to force its illiberal
vision of the world on everyone else. They won't rule the Internet and tech
world unless that world fully breaks down into very strict isolationism
(everyone for their self). China has to depend on a divide and conquer
approach, because they'll never be bigger than the world or the developed
world. So long as a large enough bunch of nations stick together, even
broadly, it'll be enough to impose that China follow a minimum set of
guidelines.

This China is no more intimidating than the USSR was at the height of its
power. The same alliances will work once again. Even the worse-than-bullheaded
Trump Admin has seen the light (which is why they're rapidly attempting to
settle trade disputes re NAFTA & EU).

The liberal world is not going to capitulate all of its values to appease
China. That guarantees a perpetual conflict of values, which will inherently
divide the world into these two large groups. China also can't out-compete and
out-innovate the combined developed world, no matter what they do.

In short, China will never rule the Internet. They will only rule their
Internet, as they have for a long time. They'll have to play by other terms to
be part of the larger, more liberal global Internet; that more liberal
Internet isn't going to change to suit China (and hasn't).

~~~
mistermann
This a rather bold and broad prediction. Personally I'm not as confident that
it's impossible for anything to go wrong, but time will tell I suppose.

~~~
iforgotpassword
Maybe not impossible, but things have to go really downhill in the West for us
to bend over this far. Look at with how much pride we show off our democratic
and free society, mentioning it whenever possible to underline our superiority
to China or other countries. You don't give that up over night just for some
economical benefit. You have to be close to starving.

I'm more worried how we start to undermine these very values ourselves in the
name of fighting terrorism etc. While everyone's busy looking at how China is
supposedly threatening our freedom, our government is already busy taking it
away slowly, not heating up the water too quickly so the frog won't notice.

------
shiburizu
"To many Chinese leaders, China’s current place in the global division of
labor looks like a trap: foreign firms reap high profits from the intellectual
property they own, and Chinese companies survive on the thin margins they make
by manufacturing and assembling physical products."

Is this not contrary to the western perception of Chinese profiteering
entirely? I don't read the chinese paper or anything but China seemed like the
last people worried about IP protections.

------
amaccuish
> the United States should work with its allies and trading partners to
> pressure Beijing to open up the Chinese market to foreign companies, curb
> its preferential treatment of Chinese firms

Ironic given the US government blocking investment from China in US firms,
blocking takeovers, blocking China Mobile etc.

------
foreignaffairs
Adam Segal is currently over on r/IAmA taking questions:
[https://redd.it/994nhf](https://redd.it/994nhf)

------
graeme
I am reminded of this excerpt from Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier, discussing
attitudes to colonialism in Britain:

(In other words, it is easy to sneer at US control of the internet, but do
people who do so _actually_ want the alternative on offer)

“The same streak of soggy half-baked insincerity runs through all 'advanced'
opinion. Take the question of imperialism, for instance. Every left-wing
'intellectual' is, as a matter of course, an anti-imperialist. He claims to be
outside the empire-racket as automatically and self-righteously as he claims
to be outside theclass-racket. Even the right-wing 'intellectual', who is not
definitely in revolt against British imperialism, pretends to regard it with a
sort of amused detachment. It is so easy to be witty about the British Empire.
The White Man's Burden and 'Rule, Britannia' and Kipling's novels and Anglo-
Indian bores--who could even mention such things without a snigger?

And is there any cultured person who has not at least once in his life made a
joke about that old Indian havildar who said that if the British left India
there would not be a rupee or a virgin left between Peshawar and Delhi (or
wherever it was)? That is the attitude of the typical left-winger towards
imperialism, and athoroughly flabby, boneless attitude it is. For in the last
resort, the only important question is. Do you want the British Empire to hold
together or do you want it to disintegrate? And at the bottom of his heart no
Englishman, least of all the kind of person who is witty about Anglo-Indian
colonels, does want it to disintegrate. For, apart from any other
consideration, the high standard of life we enjoy in England depends upon our
keeping a tight hold on the Empire, particularly the tropical portions of it
such as India and Africa. Under the capitalist system, in order that England
may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the
verge of starvation--an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every
time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream. The
alternative is to throw the Empire overboard and reduce England to a cold and
unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live
mainly on herrings and potatoes. That is the very last thing that any left-
winger wants. Yet the left-winger continues to feel that he has no moral
responsibility for imperialism. He is perfectly ready to accept the products
of Empire and to save his soul by sneering at the people who hold the Empire
together.”

~~~
Leary
I read this passage as calling out the hypocrisy of the English intellectuals
who benefit from colonialism in India while flippantly call out its moral
faults. It is not making a statement that imperialism is better than its
alternative.

Indeed Orwell himself calls out the overbearing attitude of the British
"flabby" and "boneless"

~~~
graeme
What I meant to suggest is that many people in the US took for granted the
benefits of their hegemony, much like the British intellectuals took for
granted the benefits of their imperialism. Hence, it may be a surprise to some
that loss of US hegemony may be replaced by a China-ization of the internet
outside of China.

Orwell was an anti-imperialist. I didn’t mean to say that imperialism was a
good thing - that wasn’t what he was saying. (US hegemony may or may not be a
good thing compared to the alternative - that will only become clear with
time. I think it’s less obvious than in the case of imperialism)

