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Comment by lacker | Hacker News Reader

One of the things that seems the most unfair to me about global trade is that for many American internet companies, China just totally bans them. Everything from Facebook and Google to smaller players gets hit by the great firewall. That is way more impactful than a tariff of 5% or 25%. With all of the talk of how China is or is not playing fair, I feel like their internet bans get taken for granted, and I wish there was more pressure to play fairly there.

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I agree, but it starts to get awfully close to the subject of encryption backdoors, more censorship/lockdown of political ads and other topics that are more convenient for the government to be handled separately, without the comparison to China, hence they don't bring it up.

China just marks parts of the Internet as a territory and introduces laws that meet the authority's satisfaction. Since free information and speech make people call in questions about the legitimacy of ‘the party leads everything’ and dark past, this situation won't get changed unless we distribute everything(but decentralization violates tech giants‘ interest) or a regime change happened. Otherwise, progress US and other countries made would just hold up a while.

I still think there is a good chance that China will allow more individual freedoms over time. Their people will get richer, get more familiar with the rights allowed in the rest of the world, and demand more individual liberties. The dark past will become more distant and irrelevant. And after enough time, if things go well, economic success and stability will be the source of the legitimacy of the regime, rather than a whitewashed history, so the ruling party will have less to worry about.

I could certainly be wrong. But I don't think it's right to just take it for granted that the Chinese internet will always be censored, especially when there is a discussion about whether China treats companies from other countries fairly where it is very relevant.

> With all of the talk of how China is or is not playing fair, I feel like their internet bans get taken for granted, and I wish there was more pressure to play fairly there.

In a fair environment, you'd be seeing Facebook/Google/Twitter used by hundreds of millions Chinese when most Americans paying their bills using Alipay and talk to their friends using WeChat. US dominance in tech is _NOT_ something called fair.

WeChat works just fine in the US. Facebook Messenger, a very similar product, is completely banned in China. In a fair environment, people could try out both of these apps and pick the one they liked better.

what's blocking WeChat?

WeChat is not blocked, just like a long list of US internet services not blocked in China - Amazon, NH, booking.com, ebay, uber, airbnb, expedia and many more.

That being said, Huawei and Alipay's expansion into the US has been repeatedly blocked by the US federal government [1]. By citing the same national security concerns, using such logic, Cisco and Microsoft should have long been banned in China - but they are not, both are making good $ in China.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-moneygram-intl-m-a-ant-fi...

Those companies had to obtain ICP licenses and participate in forced partnerships and open up their servers to the government.

Your claim of fairness here is simply quite laughable

Huawei would like to participate in "forced" partnership and open their servers to the US government in exchange US market access. But still, it's banned by national security. laughable?

Well I guess they shouldn't have put a backdoor in their products then. You're conflating two unrelated things.

>Well I guess they shouldn't have put a backdoor in their products then.

Citation needed. I've yet to see any evidence against Huawei and ZTE. Just FUD from the USG.

Cisco is full of backdoors either.

It seems like you undermined your own point here.

This is an amusing point of view. WeChat is really the worst messenger out there from a technical standpoint. No attempt encryption at all (who knows if they even use SSL?) and the stickers and social networking features still resemble 1st gen. messenger apps

1st gen? are you kidding? millions of its international users love it no mention 1 billion domestic users. it's just mostly designed for Chinese users.

uh, what? it has many more features than any western messenger. what makes it appeal less to western audiences is that it is precisely tailored to chinese taste/lifestyle, which is distinctively different.

Which derails the parent's vision that it would be a popular messenger in the US. Uh, what?

Your post said it’s the worst from a technical standpoint, but I’d argue it failed from a feature standpoint: half assed localization, features tailored for the Chinese market (for instance push to talk is huge there), and regarding the stickers thing, non-western friendly UI (east Asia is used to higher density designs, see any webpage in Chinese or Japanese)..

Even things like lack of encryption are missing features that we care about but Chinese users don’t, not a technical evaluation.

One feature that WeChat nailed is performance in low bandwidth connections common in China in 2010, but it’s not like that’s something we in the west care about on 3G+ connections.

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