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by smitherfield
3549 days ago
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A thought that occurred to me recently, is that the main purpose of China's "Great Firewall" isn't so much silencing dissent[0], as it is protectionism. By making it effectively impossible for foreign (i.e. American) internet companies to operate in China, they've ensured that the spaces occupied by Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Uber, and even to some extent Microsoft have been filled by Chinese-owned and China-based companies. [0] Although that too, of course. |
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The interesting trade-off though (as with all protectionism) is where the boundary between promoting and hindering innovation is.
VPN blocking Facebook probably has good ROI for generating internal social networks (which in turn can be monitored).
Blocking Google, even more so GitHub, seems far more dangerous economically as you impair innovators' abilities to obtain research done abroad. (Google is especially bad since a large percent of English language sites have Google dependencies (css/js hosting) -- effectively most of the English internet has become unusable in China without a VPN since the complete *google.com block went in).