[dreamfactored]

Monopolies are bad for consumers. The Chinese government is protecting Chinese markets from global monopolies (and also acting as the world's biggest innovation VC). Other countries have been asleep at the wheel and are only just starting to wake up with uber and airbnb. (Also the fact that fb has been caught targeting Kremlin propaganda to voters in foreign elections makes me wonder if they will get shuttered in a lot of places. And Twitter can only be next.)

[TheKarateKid]

There's a difference between protecting from global monopolies, and totally eliminating any competition.

The fact that the Chinese sanctioned companies become monopolies themselves is even more proof that it's about nationalism than protection from monopolies.

[dreamfactored]

> it's about nationalism than protection from monopolies

Well if I was Chinese I guess I'd hope my government was making some effort to protect the national interest at least.

Of course they are developing their own monopolies and have some pretty terrifying social control programs in the works. That can be criticised in its own right and hopefully it will be. But to try and make the case that FB is a benevolent saviour of the Chinese citizenry from their evil government is nonsense and whataboutery. If you must believe in the US as some kind of global beacon of free speech and democracy, then at least don't think that just being the lesser of two evils is a really great way to promote this.

The hard problem is that any proprietary social platform has to have a mass of people using it to be particularly useful, and any social platform that big is collecting data that makes it a huge security risk and economic factor at the national level. The only solutions I can think of are to have social networks under national control or to promote interoperability between smaller networks and partition data collection to an acceptable level for national security purposes.

[davemp]

> The Chinese government is protecting Chinese [control over citizens] markets

> and also acting as the world's biggest innovation VC

Wew.

> Other countries have been asleep at the wheel

Calm down with the CN propaganda.

[dreamfactored]

It's a general question of national security for any country, and in the broader sense which also includes control of their economies. The Chinese have been very smart about this, other countries should look at this. I don't think that's pushing a pro-Chinese line so much as about other countries needing to learn something about protecting national interest from 'foreign data invaders' (which have been mainly US to date but which I can see starting to include Russia and China)