The Chinese government actually has very little incentive to allow foreign internet companies inside China. By restricting outside companies they do the following<p>1. Reduce the ability of outsiders to influence their people<p>2. Avoid Arab Spring like events where because the companies are foreign, the coordinating network is opaque to the government<p>3. Allow the domestic internet companies a chance to grow and develop without competition from established foreign companies<p>4. Retain and develop talent and technology (ie big data, machine learning) domestically<p>Because China has such a large population, they can easily develop and sustain their own internal internet industry without needing Western/American companies.<p>I think the Snowden leaks showed that the Internet has been weaponized by the United States and having American companies controlling large services like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter gives the US government a massive trove of intelligence. It also enables them to influence citizens of other countries. I think a lot of countries in the near future will see the Internet as essential to their national security and thus try to limit foreign influence as much as they can with varying degrees of success
One does not simply launch a website on a server inside of China. First, I had to wait about four months on a waitlist with AWS-China to get setup with an AWS-China account for our China business. Now, I've had the AWS-China account for about 3 months and still awaiting the ICP license to be issued, so I can actually open port 80 on a VM. No less, the time it took to get fully functioning companies in place to even be able to have a business account. It is a crazy struggle over here, but I guess if it was easy, everybody would be doing it.<p>Edit: forgot to mention that the solution also depends on my Chinese wife having her name on the ICP linense documents. It wouldn't even get done without that.
I never understood why Western technology companies haven't taken China to a WTO tribunal for restricting their business practices. I mean, China exports trillions of dollars worth of goods to us yet when you try to export services to China, you're met with "The Golden Shield Project" aka "The Great Firewall of China". That doesn't seem like a fair deal at all.
This reminds me of the Ming and Qing dynasty when the emperors decided to close the door and shut out foreigners. Gradually, China fell behind and the western powers bombed the door open during the opium war.<p>It is unlikely that other countries will bomb open the door this time, as China is a great military power. Instead, it will be disbenefit to Chinese people and consumers as they cannot access the services from outside.
Everyone want to be like China and control their internet, their people and their industry and avoid external competition. Most countries can't quite do it or are unwilling to because it does have downsides.
Utter crap.<p>I have and continue to run companies inside of China, and have lived here on and off for 16 years. IMHO like most of the China-focused muck-slinging coming out of US media (increasingly frequently of late), this article lacks context and basically cries wolf over nothing concrete whatsoever.<p>First it claims "required security checks on companies in industries like finance and communications, and mandatory in-country data storage". That's really no different to EU and US regulations. Anyway, if the journalist (who according to the dateline allegedly published from Hong Kong) had basic knowledge about mainland China, they would know that <i>foreigners are largely barred from finance and communications-related business anyway</i> (despite China committing to open finance when it joined the WTO).<p>Finally, in China it's <i>extremely</i> common for new laws to be made (eg. "smoking inside is illegal") but absolutely zero enforcement to be done.<p>(Edit in response to stupendous quantity of downvotes: Oh sorry for having an informed opinion instead of upvoting faux-journalism that agrees with ignorant anti-foreign sensibilities. The evil freedom-destroying communists are coming! Run for the hills!)