China tightens Great Firewall by declaring unauthorised VPN services illegal

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12 points·uaaa··4 comments

I wonder how much this costs in economic loss just to keep the populous in the dark about the realities of the party?

Can you still access information you need in what ever industry youre in? Can you find the right scientific answers to your questions? Does it slow down traffic? Does it cripple innovation, R&D, and technology exports? etc

I'd love to see a study about this without being about politics. I remember reading a book about China by a New Yorker journalist and he believes their information control is very very effective and political dissent against the party is pretty non existant - not just repressed but people just don't care. So I'm curious at what external costs, other than the obvious loss of freedom of politics, are a consequence.

Unfortunately, it's not economic loss, it's economic gain. By building the great firewall, China kept out Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc., and thus enabled some huge companies to come into existence that likely otherwise wouldn't have, e.g., Baidu, Tencent, etc. I'm surprised more countries aren't doing this in order to enable their own IT worlds to come into existence.

I went to one Android dev meetup in China and some of the local engineers seemed frustrated, because GFW occasionally blocks Github.com or developers.google.com ...

the same day last year, China gov did say control VPN services as well. then, tech triumphed. Always

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