[kirillseva]

I remember a discussion on HN about Orchid Protocol, where proponents argued that if you route traffic through GCP/AWS China wouldn't dare ban the big american clouds because that would, in effect, ban most of legitimate internet for its citizens, and that would have a net negative effect on its economy and its citizens' well-being.

Russia shows that political will and/or technical incompetence can easily overlook these things.

[ploxiln]

China already blocks services broadly. But here's a funny example: chinese developers ask me to vendor dependencies for a golang service (copy them into my the repo, they're already version-locked) because china blocks golang.org and some deps are under golang.org/x/... - I guess China just really doesn't like Google, I can't imagine another reason to block golang.org

I think the hardest thing for China is GitHub, they've gone back and forth on that one.

[cstejerean]

China couldn’t care about breaking AWS and therefore most of the western companies that depend on it, it would simply provide an advantage to domestic competitors. Last time I lived in China the average person didn’t use much from outside of China on a daily basis and it’s only gotten worse (back then people still used Facebook over VPNs but that has mostly gone away as far as I can tell after China started more seriously cracking down on VPNs).

[vbezhenar]

It's similar with Russia. It has its own search (Yandex), lots of mail servers, video hosting, social network (vk), etc. Western analogs are popular, but if they would become inaccessible, most of people would switch and not care that much.

[hangonhn]

"would have a net negative effect on its economy and its citizens' well-being"

That's how you can tell when a person has grown up in a democracy with accountability to its people and also has over generalized about the rest of the world. Both China and Russia has historically shown a preference for the state over their populace. I'm not trying to knock those two countries because the willingness to do that can sometimes give certain disadvantaged states the ability to outlast or outfight their rivals. But one shouldn't assume one's own conditions are universal. There are many other viable options outside of one's own country.

[eigenvector]

Which is more likely: an authoritarian state backs down on censorship to avoid blocking US-based internet services, or Google / Microsoft / Amazon terminate the banned service's account to avoid losing other, more profitable customers?

[jessaustin]

...or maybe HN was wrong?

[kirillseva]

blasphemy!

[rdtsc]

> China wouldn't dare ban the big american clouds because that would, in effect, ban most of legitimate internet for its citizens

They could go the other way and find an excuse to ban them then cite how these capitalist swamp countries are sheltering and fostering terrorists and criminals and people should use Chinese service providers. In other words censorship can be used to reach other goals, besides just controlling the flow of ideas.