China Blocks Foreign Companies from Mapping Its Roads for Self-Driving Cars
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
It's a pretty common tactic. Cite "national security" or any other vaguely plausible reason to deny access to non-favored firms (foreign companies, and local companies who don't have the "connections"). If anyone complains, government spokesperson and 50 cent mafia generate lots of angry nationalistic crying. If another country retaliates, same spokesperson and 50 cent mafia will then decry with a straight face how hypocritical "democracies" are and how great Xi Jinping is.
The game plan is simple. Buy and/or steal tech. Rebadge as Chinese, then bankrupt the original creators by leveraging government subsidies and underpaid workers ie Segway.
Any self-driving car can map out your roads. Saying "no road mapping for your [future] self driving cars" is silly. It could be boiled down to "no camera borne cars" which necessitates no self-driving cars.
And if they don't want our self-driving cars I don't want theirs.
Not about this particular example but we know that’s not how it works; people buy whatever is cheap so not wanting something on invidual level works if you are strong and willing to spend 2-3-4-n x the money, but in general people will just buy. In the 80s many people said it about Japanese cars and yet everyone bought them eventually because cheap and good. Even in China, where many people have the old hate against Japan (far stronger than your feelings most likely as the Japenese did horrible things here), they still drive Toyota etc and they see the issue with that but it’s cheaper than German and better than Chinese, so what can you do.
Also I think you severely overestimate the subtlety of Chinese propaganda.
Europe doesn't have a Google, Facebook, or Amazon, because the major US companies got there early enough to dominate the entire market. I wouldn't necessarily say that that's a good result for those countries.
If yes, then why are you complaining? If not, then why are you applying double standards here?
Blocking a chip or other technology that's hard to vet is one thing.
Blocking mapping when the same is already accessible from space via spy and public satellites? Does not really makes sense.
Now, of course these cases can and should be compared, but so far it seems that citing national security issues in one case seems to be pretty baseless excuse, whereas in the other case it seems to have some merit, even if the actual ban of Chinese sourced components is ridiculous, because a lot of other things are sourced/imported from China with the same or more severe espionage potential.
Then no one needs to map the road anyway, why bother?
What the US government HASN'T done is say "sorry ZTE, you can't sell ANY phones in the US because national security". There's a very, very big difference.
Huawei are the poster child case you cite in favor of protecting your domestic companies.
I think the US/EU should retaliate on this particular policy for China specifically. This is way overdue.
All Western companies with offices and factories in China have been compromised. From their financial records to trade secrets, all have been stolen by the Chinese.
In the late 90's my employer (leading technology company) implemented an IDS. We were stunned at the amount of internal attack activity aimed at our Accounting, HR and Research areas of the company all coming from our Chinese office and Factory. It had been completely infiltrated by Chinese military at every level.
If applied aggressively it would lead to a very large recession or depression, and maybe even war.
The west is in a vastly better position to exploit a trade war with China than China is. Thus, China is more likely to back down when pushed.
Remember, a little give and take keeps players honest. Without that their is not reason for China not to try and bend the rules as much as possible.
There are legitimate security reasons to restrict maps, so this seems unlikely to be something easy to mobilise a larger trade war over.
The sanctions wouldn't have need to be in the exact same area, just ones that would cause equivalent pain.
Just because the Chinese government is stopping Alice from mapping Chinese roads doesn't mean your government should stop Bob from buying Chinese maps. Why should your government punish Bob just because the Chinese government punished Alice? Alice and Bob don't even know each other.
Starting? Begun, the trade war has.
Frankly the world has never had free trade; it's just had freer trade in recent years than in the past. There are constant disputes in the WTO about tariffs, subsidies, and other protectionist measures implemented by western countries as well as China. Free-trade deals reduce barriers to trade in some areas and increase them in others. This mapping situation is just another routine trade dispute.
No, it literally is business. China sells products in the West the value of which derives from there being good mapping data of the West. Banning this same data being collected there is an unfair distortion of the market.
Like, so many people on HN worship "the market" like it matters beyond our tiny, irrelevant life spans, it's horrific.
If I lease my apartment to another person on Airbnb, I am under no obligation to lease my apartment to them or at all.
The fact that we take advantage of their exports does not compel them to do the same.
So, like, don't buy Chinese products taking advantage of Western mapping data, but do so quietly since, you know, they don't have to do anything economically that they don't want to do.
Most educated Western adults were raised in an environment of well-intended anti-racism propaganda, so are unable to think clearly about any topic that involves race in any way.
There is also quite literally nothing racist about it, but you've proven my point quite well (in that you see racism where it doesn't exist, a specific example of the more general point I was making).
China is NOT blocking it because it is self-driving (which is what you might assume). China blocks pretty much any mapping.
I haven't been to China btw; I'm curious if OpenStreetMap would work.
https://www.voanews.com/a/google-maps-data-south-korea/36021...
I was just in Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou for a week. I purchased a Hong Kong sim for my phone. Google and Facebook were not blocked when using tbat sim but they were blocked on hotel WiFi.
So then trying Google Maps the location was always wrong. So wrong as to be unusable. But, trying Apple Maps it was always correct. It seems like that could only happen by regulation not technical means. The iPhone itself isn't going to give different GPS info depending on which app is running is it ? Which seems to means Google Maps' location is wrong because the Chinese government told Google to make it wrong?
Apple Maps in China uses Autonavi maps which are licensed by the Chinese government. Note that these maps are different than the maps seen in Apple Maps outside of Mainland China.
Google and Facebook weren't blocked using your Hong Kong sim because roaming sims tunnel data out of the country and connect to the internet there (like a vpn!).
The worst accidental mistake I have ever made with respect to geodetic coordinates, relating to accumulating floating-point round-off errors, absolutely pales in comparison to the sheer idiocy of introducing errors into your geodetic datum on purpose.
Look, people, satellite photography exists now. That objective reality maps really well onto a coordinate systems based on a smooth ellipsoid. If you intentionally make your domestically-produced map products harder to use for people in your own country, they will buy better maps from other countries. If your goal is to make your 50 most important military assets harder to find, and in the process make it harder to find a billion civilian assets, you're going to lose more money just paying all those delivery drivers to get lost for 20 minutes than it would cost to rebuild those 50 military assets 10 times over.
Is it really? Or would it all be compressible if someone else had complete control over your manufacturing and hardware supply chain?
Strategically I think China having a bigger Amazon competitor than anyone else pales in its relevance to the US compared to US infrastructure relying on Chinese-produced components.
It will be interesting to watch the ramifications of this sort of policy. As China moves to become a leading economy with a high level of technology distributed throughout the country, it will become harder to control communications and information dispersal. Historically information access has been anathema to their style of governing and I can't see how they can have both.
At this point all the strategic things an invading army worries about (bridge heights, strength of roads, width between buildings for turning tanks, etc) can be obtained easily from overhead reconnaissance.
Hedge funds have been flying satellites to collect economic indicators (traffic flow in retail spaces, fill levels in oil storage tanks, number of ships in port, etc) since the '90s.
That information may or may not be interesting to the military but I can imagine ways that it would be interesting to business and finance and enforcement folks. It is perhaps opportunities for that sort of scrutiny that is unwelcome?
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/satellite-image-resolution-ke...
Obviously street level data is always better, but from a governmental standpoint I don't believe China has effectively denied us anything we care about. Wifi capture happens over other countries at 25,000 feet from MQ-9's, so we could probably do it in China if we cared enough.
Not only the foreign companies, even a lot of chinese companies are still not allowed to do such measurements.
It was rather a military decision than an economic one.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_d...
Large militaries will create their own up-to-date maps for every region of the world where they could possibly expect to be operating. They will, of course, keep strategic details in such maps secret, but with a bit of marginal effort, the maps deemed to have low military relevance can also be sold to civilians for their business purposes.
In order to keep a location secret now, it can't be visible from space. And it can't have surface roads leading to it, or even change the surface significantly from historic aerial photographs of the same location. And it definitely can't have radio signals coming out of it. That basically means tunnels and submarines.
There exist people whose jobs are to stare at satellite images all day, classify them, and draw shapes into a database. There is no longer any credible military rationale for restricting by law the creation of surface maps.
China might also be concerned about internal security.
China doesn't want foreign companies making money from Chinese maps in China. As a result, Chinese firms may make a tiny bit more money, but one billion people have drastically worse maps.
The potential-foreign-influenced-insurrection-to-better-maps exhange rate is tough to pin down. ;)
This is something that the Chinese government demonstrably does not care about.
They even mandate that an obfuscated coordinate system be used by GPS units and maps in China.
AI: https://www.ft.com/content/856753d6-8d31-11e7-a352-e46f43c58...
Quantum tech: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/security/china-s...
Thank goodness other countries are waking up:
"The United States, European Union and Japan vowed on Tuesday to work together to fight market-distorting trade practices and policies that have fueled excess production capacity, naming several key features of China’s economic system."
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trade-wto/u-s-eu-japan-sl...
"US formally opposes China market economy status at WTO"
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/30/us-formally-opposes-china-ma...
"TRUMP STARTS NEW WAR AGAINST CHINA OVER 'ECONOMIC AGGRESSION'"
http://www.newsweek.com/trump-starts-new-war-against-china-o...
It's also untrue.
For example, lets go to the WTO itself and see the list of current disputes, which is helpfully grouped by country: https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/dispu_by_countr...
- China is currently responding to 39 complaints.
- The USA is responding to 132. Which is more than the entire EU (84) and more than any other country.
It's really tiring to see the "China is a protectionist market" narrative trotted out again and again, unchallenged, and is probably second only to the "China is encroaching on the South China sea" narrative in terms of how hypocritical both views are, especially when espoused by Americans.
It's true that such a view doesn't disregard the often equally protectionist approaches of countries like the US, yes, but the former can't be denied just because of the latter.
A successful WTO claim against America is tantamount to fiscal settlement. The same is far from true for China. They routinely rip off foreign companies. Google "Nortel China hack" and come back to me about something equivalent that the Americans have done. The Americans aren't angels, but they aren't demons either and China does not respect international norms or laws.