[zhemao]

It's not just the technical services those platforms provide, but also the content hosted on them and the other users who use them. The article mentions Dropbox and Google Drive. Even if a Chinese file-sharing service was created as a replacement, good luck convincing foreign collaborators to use it. Also blocked are YouTube and Twitter, which are great platforms for promoting your work to a global audience. I just don't see the Chinese government handicapping their researchers this way just for some extra control.

What's more likely is they'll work out a deal with trusted universities and corporations to give their employees access to an official VPN through which they can get unrestricted internet access. But all traffic through this VPN will be closely monitored.

[nine_k]

I don't see why getting certain videos whitelisted and proxied through an official site or GFW directly would not be viable.

Same for twitter: send your tweets via an approved gateway, get them reviewed an pushed to Twitter, get pre-censored retweets as they appear and get approved. Make the international voice of the PRC researchers official-only, Soviet-style.

With corporations, it's harder. But for each "we don't trust your servers" from a Western corp side there could be a symmetric "we don't trust your servers" from Chinese side. The resolution depends on who needs the other side more; I bet that in most cases it would be Western corporations giving in.

[baybal2]

There is no such thing as an "official VPN"