[donaldc]

From the article:

The standards will take effect from April 1, 2013, and will also require residences to offer equal connections to services from various telecom companies allowing customers to choose which service they want.

Amazingly, this means that China is now ahead of the U.S. regarding net neutrality.

Now, if they'd just do something about the Great Firewall..

[pfisch]

All of the various telecom companies are state owned. So I guess there is net neutrality in the sense that you can expect the same level of censorship on each state owned ISP which is really the same ISP.

Yeah, China is really showing America how net neutrality should be done...

In reality there is just one more official to bribe to build a house.

[ChuckMcM]

It is seductively powerful being a dictatorship. You can do things like this. Its not all its cracked up to be living with it though.

[loceng]

Pretty sure you could make this a legal requirement even in a democracy.

[anigbrowl]

Not without people screaming about the danger of government meddling in industrial policy and wrangling over it for the better part of a decade.

[gizmo686]

That's capitalist democracy. You could have a democracy where the government does control (or has significant influence over) industry.

[loceng]

And not allow the government to be the scapegoat for corporate-driven changes and rules.

[kalleboo]

In the US maybe, but I could easily see something like this happening in Scandinavia. Sweden already has a lot of provider-neutral municipal fiber.

[Volpe]

Pretty sure Australia has done just that. State owned central ISP (NBN: National Broadband Network).

[w1ntermute]

I hope China goes the way of South Korea and Taiwan. A transition to democracy once the economy's improved enough. The only problem is that its size means that China can't take the export oriented path to growth at the same rate that SK/Taiwan did.

[dnu]

On the other hand, China has a lot of investment to do in its western part of the country.

[w1ntermute]

Yeah, that's my point. China can't modernize so quickly because it has a large hinterland that SK and Taiwan don't.

[kinghajj]

If China is a dictatorship, then who is the dictator? It rather seems to be run by the inner Party leaders.

[seanmcdirmid]

Its more like an Aristocracy these days (as it was pretty much before since before Qin). Certain powerful families control about 90% of the government and 40% of the economy. Otherwise, the government is completely opaque, and its hard to tell who is really in charge and what relationships (guanxi) connect them together.

[rdl]

From what I've read, the national government is a lot more consistent and essentially "good" than some of the local government leaders, which is kind of the opposite of the US.

(I'd still far prefer the US to China, and don't think either the US or China are perfect, but most China's regional governments seem to be really bad even in comparison to the national government.)

[seanmcdirmid]

No not really, but the national government wants you to think so. The local (less powerful) officials have always been convenient fall guys for national problems, as in "we are good, but our hand chosen underlings are the bad guys." The problems are pervasive up and down.

You'll find that a city like Shanghai or even Kunming are much better governed than the capital of Beijing due to strong local governments and less national government interference.

[rdl]

Shanghai is an exception, as are the SEZes. Shanghai almost seems like another country -- it's not as uncorrupt as HK, but is pretty similar to a place like Thailand, from what I saw of it (I know some people who have businesses there, and have spent about a year in total between HK, Shanghai, and Thailand, although I only did business myself in HK)

[ChuckMcM]

You should try reading stuff written by Tibetans :-) More seriously though after going through various debates both with Chinese nationals and Chinese ex-patriots the only conclusion I can rely on is that its "complicated" and just as someone from the #Occupy movement might write a very different description of the benevolence of our government than someone in the 1%, points of view are greatly affected by their origin.

[rdl]

Yeah, I'm not really including Tibet. I see that as a geo-strategic thing vs. India, and Tibet wasn't exactly a progressive wonderful state before the Chinese, either.

However, in Western China, non-Han seem to be treated better by the national government than by regional or local. Although the weird "Uighurs in Guantanamo" thing was just totally surreal (we essentially bribed China into supporting us in the Iraq war by letting them classify muslim semi-separatists as global jihadis, and thus cooperating with the Chinese government in detaining them)

[dmix]

Source(s)?

[rdl]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_China is a start http://www.transparency.org/news/feature/fighting_corruption...

There have been a fair number of executions of local government officials.

It's much easier to make the case "corruption at the local level is really bad" vs. "the central government isn't corrupt" -- I'm just saying the local people are worse than the central government in a lot of ways.

The least corrupt entity is the PLA, which has the most power at the national level.

The most corrupt things are land sales, which are handled at the local level.

[ksec]

Uhm... That is what is happening in Japan. But Not in China.

[seanmcdirmid]

Sounds very wumao!

[guard-of-terra]

It's not just China. In many places in the world you have a choice of a variety of ISPs to subscribe to. Including where I live - it's not required or mandated but still taken for granted.

[tokenadult]

I have a choice of ISPs (none run by the government) through the TV cables that run into my home. Fiber-optic cables haven't reached our outer-ring metropolitan neighborhood. DSL took a long time to come here, because of where the telephone substations are in this town.

[ScottWhigham]

Wait - how is "equal connections to services from various telecom companies allowing customers to choose which service they want" the same as "net neutrality"? Can you elaborate how specifically China is "head of the U.S." in that regard?

[31reasons]

Its amazing what a government can do in the absence of powerful lobbying groups.

[runeks]

I fail at being amazed over a government mandating things.

And what makes you think this happened in the absence of lobbying? For all we know, this could have come after one of the CEOs of China's ISPs invited the right officials out for dinner.

I get a bit scared when I see people who seem to view this as progress.