You're making a bad assumption - that because protectionism resulted in a flourishing Internet economy, that it wouldn't have happened without protectionism. Imagine what kind of Internet economy we'd have in China without this dumb firewall and protectionist policies in place - Baidu might actually be a global rival to Google instead of the piece of crap it is :) Global consumers might be happily buying from Taobao instead of the piece of crap that Amazon is :)