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Comment by borkborkbork | Hacker News Reader

China and Russia are doing this largely to avoid Western cultural and political influence. Their choice to opt out does not necessarily imply that we're structuring our networks in the most just or efficient way.

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To me it is a testament for the resilience and sane architecture of the Internet as we know it that restrictive governments can not achieve their goal without changing the underlying structure of their part to a central controlled version. Other technologies like the radio or telephone were centralised by default, so much more "dictatorship friendly".

The U.S. government seems to have no trouble achieving its commercial and surveillance goals under the current architecture.

Really? I only hear western governments whining that encryption threaten their surveillance powers [1][2].

[1] http://bigstory.ap.org/article/7d57f576e3f74b6ca4cd3436fbebf...

[2] http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/24/12621834/france-germany-en...

Your argument assumes it's not within their power to end this threat. In fact, the Senate proposed a bill that does just that [1]. There's nothing inherent to the current architecture that prevents the government from compelling companies to do their bidding. We've seen that time and time again with NSA surveillance. The crux of this article is that the Internet was largely funded by the public, then handed over to an oligopoly of telecoms in the 1990's. There's nothing about this arrangement that protects average users. In fact, it is partially responsible for the U.S. having the slowest average broadband speeds of any industrialized nation [2].

[1] http://www.dailydot.com/layer8/encryption-backdoors-legislat...

[2] http://gizmodo.com/why-americas-internet-is-so-shitty-and-sl...

It does imply that we are structuring our networks in a way that doesn't have the capabilities for restriction that they would like.

That's correct. We don't enforce restrictions on political speech or deviant pornography, for the most part. But we do enforce intellectual property restrictions that largely benefit Western corporate interests.

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