I lived in Shanghai for 6 months and the internet sucked more then the air and thats when its hurting to take in a deep breath in winter. After returning to Germany I was more happy about the free internet (and freedom of speech and so on..) then about the clean air.

To me comparing China to the NSA (USA) is weak. As you wrote this, the current top result on Reddit is this: https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/98el62/un_says_i...

I dont see the USA getting these kinds of headlines anytime soon. Moreover China has earned critique for partially rolling out their citizen scoring. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System https://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-cr...

I am not the biggest fan of the GDPR and its also tragic to me that Europe has no real innovative internet companies. And as far as I know Brazil has some big challenges with corruption so I wouldn't take its policies as a shining example (not implying that you did though).

I kind of see the internet as my home and culture in many ways. I have met Egyptians, Brazilians and Koreans that shared the same internet culture as me. In contrast I have made much fewer friends in mainland China due to them not using the same internet as me (and thus not having even remotely something in common). They instead consume their own entertainment such as Chinese soap operas which my mainland friends have told me are vastly inferior to their western counterparts (not soap operas but entertainment and culture in general). Finally the restricted access inhibits the development of better English skills which further divides

I dont care much for visas or nation-sovereignty. I hope that we one day have universal human right centered values based on an free internet and open borders so that I am not limited in my pursuit of happiness by some arbitrary political rule.