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Comment by li-ch | Hacker News Reader

China's e-commerce sites don't have such a worry. They have Great Firewall. Trade barrier works! /s

I don't think that /s is necessary. I think the years have proved that china's trade barrier has worked wonders for home grown businesses. Look at didi chuxing. Blindly aped uber and worth more than them now. On the other hand look at India's own uber competitor: ola. They're struggling almost as much as flipkart while uber thunders ahead.

Unfortunately most Chinese are not tech workers reaping in cash, they're consumers who have to make do with poorer quality local offerings like Baidu and Weibo.

>and worth more than them now

You cannot trust any valuation that comes out of China.

But as an Indian consumer, I have happy that I have a choice and I believe in the long run the more open Indian market would prove more beneficial to local businesses.

Their market caps notwithstanding - Alibaba, Didi Kuaidi and Baidu are not global companies. India already has one of the largest global ad networks outside of Google i.e. InMobi and I believe over the next 20 years, you'll see much more truly global Internet companies started out of India vs. China.

Of course trade protectionism is good for the protected industries. That should be self-evident.

The more important question is whether the benefit to domestic industry offsets the harm to consumers. Traditional economics would say no and I'd be inclined to agree.

Amazon is years ahead in customer support and services. Yes. but in terms of products sold, I'd argue that they are mostly the same: made in China or southeast Asia.

Almost anything can be bought on Amazon, but yes the majority of all products in the world are produced in Asia. I'm not sure why that's a bad thing.

Works for whom? Definitely not the consumer. I am happy my friends and family are enjoying the reliability and customer support of Amazon. I wished flipkart upped their game, but apparently they did not. Amazon has a well of experience, even though the market is new, they know what parameters to look for and best of all, can wait for a decade before turning profit.

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