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Comment by lagadu | Hacker News Reader

This is great. The US has effectively (if unwittingly) given the biggest step in history towards actually decentralizing some of the most critical web services away from being under the control of a single government. I legit hope they keep doubling down on this policy, as we all win from this course of action.

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I hope that the outcome you describe occurs. However, it seems equally likely that a centralised alternative will appear in China, just as there are local Chinese variants of the services Google, FB, et al. provide. Indeed, this would be in the interests of the government, who would then be able to have GitHub without the political ructions that accompany it.

A code hosting service that can be persuaded to not host projects that can inconvenience the government (or party)? I guess this sounds attractive to a certain kind of people.

Where "certain kind of people" would be "all people in China" since their options would be limited to either (a) use said service or (b) not access the blocked original version.

Ceteris paribus, a blocked service is better than no service, yes. But (1) VPNs exist, (2) decentralisation is surely not so infeasible as to rule out evasion of various blocks, and (3) the government might even decide to prioritise scientific development over absolute political control. (Certainly it seems that the scientists within the party are agitating for freer access to foreign papers.)

As a Chinese developer, my thoughts are:

Using technology/standard/service provided by US based private companies introduce risks. We are not just 'use/steal' these technologies/standard, we also heavily invest, enrich ecosystem, build services on top of them, that means if US government kill it at any time, those investments may lost too.

Based on my experience, Chinese government is so incompetent that it can't create an alternative, or initiate one, at least in the Internet industry, also China have to do business with other countries(other than US), so clearly create a private tech/standard stack is not an option. That means big companies like Huawei/Tencent/Alibaba/Baidu will start/continue to support&invest more in true open technologies, like linux/risk-v, perhaps favor true oss communities rather than google/fb owned oss projects(like android/arm/tensorflow).

Companies in countries other than China and US should also think about this risk, today US is banning Huawei, you may think it's all because China is evil, similar things happened for Japan 2 decades ago, and may still possible for India(if its population and GDP growth rate continues).

it's not all black and white like that. Chinese govt has been encouraging violating patents and corporate espionage for decades now. At the same time, it's threatening all its neighbors. The issue is not the population/GDP growth. The issue is that China wants to run the world, and USA doesn't want to give up its mantle.

I wish the same. But the sad reality is probably more "segmented internet" instead of a "decentralized internet".

Thing is, even if countries go full-on isolationist and block all foreign websites, it only takes one hole in the dam for traffic to flow through. It's not like they're going to change the protocols so the separate networks are no longer compatible.

What you said is true. However, if the said country is determined to go full-on isolationist, they have other means to prevent people from using the "holes", like creating laws to go after the people.

As the article points out, Github remains unblocked due to it's economic importance to developers, despite it hosting material such as the 996 protest.

If Github were to be rebuilt in China, I do not believe that it would be redesigned with decentralization as a guiding principle. The Government would view this as a great opportunity to 'fix' issues with the current setup. The replacement would be receive funding from the Government and it would be designed with national interests (as defined by the Government) forefront in mind.

The good news is that according to @decster in a cousin comment, it may be the case that the Government is sufficiently incompetent that this may not be a risk. On the other hand, incompetence in Government hasn't stopped bad ideas from being forced on people in the past, so...

That, or it will bring everything under the control of the Chinese government.

Perhaps people will start realising that using Github is both handing your code to a third party and hosting it in the USA, with all the consequences these choices entail.

Have they taken the step towards decentralizing, or are they creating more reasons for people to make that step instead? I guess in some contexts that counts as the step anyway...

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