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Comment by 3pt14159 | Hacker News Reader

This is just a Bloomberg PR piece. China has a plan for the internet: Don't let outsiders control critical IT infrastructure / personal data.

> It was widely suggested in press accounts that the Chinese government helped Didi in its battle against Uber. Cheng rejects that, noting that as the largest ride-hailing company, Didi had to shoulder most of the regulatory burden and paid tens of millions of yuan to cover driver traffic citations and other fines.

Here in 2015 is the president of Didi talking about the strong government support they received:

http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000395252

I'm not criticizing them, if I were China I wouldn't want the USA in charge of that either, but let's not pretend this was a level playing field.

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A thought that occurred to me recently, is that the main purpose of China's "Great Firewall" isn't so much silencing dissent[0], as it is protectionism.

By making it effectively impossible for foreign (i.e. American) internet companies to operate in China, they've ensured that the spaces occupied by Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Uber, and even to some extent Microsoft have been filled by Chinese-owned and China-based companies.

[0] Although that too, of course.

Oh definitely.

The interesting trade-off though (as with all protectionism) is where the boundary between promoting and hindering innovation is.

VPN blocking Facebook probably has good ROI for generating internal social networks (which in turn can be monitored).

Blocking Google, even more so GitHub, seems far more dangerous economically as you impair innovators' abilities to obtain research done abroad. (Google is especially bad since a large percent of English language sites have Google dependencies (css/js hosting) -- effectively most of the English internet has become unusable in China without a VPN since the complete *google.com block went in).

I agree, to that extent, I really wish Bloomberg or Business Insider articles weren't posted on HN. They often are fluff and don't understand the details, and thus just create unneeded noise on HN.

I disagree on a wholesale "ban". There are some excellent Bloomberg pieces that dive into details correctly (particularly items by Matt Levine and Megan McArdle over at Bloomberg view).

But these shiny, infographic-like Bloomberg Businessweek features tend to be light and fluffy. Ugh.

To be fair, Uber is heavily subsidizing rides in China (below cost). Even in the US, a foreign company doing this could have anti-dumping tariffs slapped on them.

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