[bnomis]

The main reasons local versions are more popular are a combination of:

- it's in Chinese

- it's not blocked by the GFW

- it's faster (the GFW slows access to everything outside of it down)

- it's still accessible when China Telecom has been tweaking the routers and DNS servers (which they seem to do every week)

That is, practical reasons which lead to adoption and growth.

There are, of course, cultural specifics that have to be taken into account but those are pretty obvious if you're building a site in China for the the local market. And these local touches can only add to the site attractiveness together with being inside of the GFW. So, it's kind of obvious that a local site is going to do better than a foreign one.

Occassionally people will talk about designing the look of the site for the local market but I'm not convinced it's an issue. Good taste is good taste everywhere. For example, the iPod is just as popular here as everywhere else. A well designed and functional site in China is always going to win over the equivalent site that is outside of the GFW for the reasons above.

[est]

> the GFW slows access to everything outside of it down

Just FYI: the GFW works in parallel, all backbone cross nation data are copied to GFW equipments, and GFW actively injects RST packets into backbone transmissions. I don't see how this slows the Internet down. It's just the total bandwidth is too small. There has to be more cross-pacific fiber optics.

[bnomis]

Yes the GFW is regional - i.e. there's more than one filter across the country. But the GFW actively monitors and blocks on content. This filtering and inspection takes finite time and hence slows everything down.

There is plenty of bandwidth. Accessing the same sites from Hong Kong is orders of magnitude faster. And BTW less prone to random errors introduced by clueless monopoly operators.

[est]

> blocks on content

Perhaps you didn't understand how GFW works. The content is delivered to you after the RST signal, it's just the standard TCP stack ignored it. You browser may loading a page in half then suddenly Page-Not-Found, but if you have sniffer like tcpdump you can see the rest of the packets were still sent to you correctly.

Another phenomenon to help you understand the mechanism is that GFW fails from time to time. Why? Because the RST packets arrives too late.

HK has its own Internet infrastructure, it has nothing to do with mainland Internet. In fact lots of inner-China Internet connections are routed to HK then to the rest of the world.

[bnomis]

The fact that RST is sent mid stream in no way lessens the point that the content monitoring leads to a narrowing of bandwidth which slows things down.

HK's Internet Infrastructure maybe its own but it is still this side of the Pacific and it is a lot faster to access US sites from HK than it is from China. And if, as you said, China traffic is routed through HK then the only difference is the GFW which is slowing things down.

[est]

So what's your point? I don't see how GFW slows the Internet down in any way. Except RST packets bandwidth which is too tiny.

[bnomis]

Just because you don't see how it slows things down does not mean that it does not slow things down. The web in China is slower than the web in HK. Why? I don't know precisely because I don't have access to the GFW of course. Think of it as a funnel, the communication has to pass through the funnel so that the RST (or whatever) can be inserted. There's only so much BW in to and out of the funnel - so the traffic slows. The very fact the filtering happens must insert some delay.

Have you tried the web in China?