So, maybe firewall off China for a couple of days? Sure, it would hurt on both sides but at least it would be clear that abuse at this scale leads to being blackholed.
There is plenty of historical precedent for this: spammers' IP ranges would be blackholed to send a message to their ISPs that such behavior wasn't tolerated. That the Chinese authorities decide to play this game at the nation state level should not give them a free pass, but should result in a nation state level response.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship
The criminal co-opting of networks and nodes on those networks is not speech by any definition.
I'm either misunderstanding what you're saying, or it doesn't make sense. If a bunch of people take signs (with legitimate messages, free speech) and hang them off a bridge over the highway (causing accidents), then those people go jail. The fact that their message is free speech is irrelevant. The source of the message is being punished/jailed, not the message.
Am I mis-representing your statement?
To put it another way: if someone steals my car and uses it to rob a bank, even if that car is now evidence in a criminal investigation, it's still my car. The police have every right to confiscate it from the thief—it's not their car—but that doesn't mean that it suddenly belongs to them; it belongs to me. In both this case and the above case, I have a right to not be unduly punished for the actions of an unrelated third party (by having my website taken down; or by having my car permanently confiscated, respectively.)
The context here is very similar to a story that was on HN just yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21671579). Banning a site from the internet for happening to be MITMed by China is very similar in its ethical implications to banning a site from the Internet for happening to have a domain-name that fits a pattern used by a botnet.
At this point we really need to start doing the "You wanted a Great Firewall? Enjoy. You now have no connection."
Removing China from the internet would also likely cause things that phone home to China to break. That would actually create some consumer awareness to boot.
Not my problem. Figure out a better way than getting in bed with fascist countries and then complaining when the inevitable door swings shut due to rightful backlash.
I think we generally overestimate the hurt on the outside and underestimate the hurt on the inside considering the massive trade imbalance that China enjoys with the rest of the world.
Personally I have already pi-holed entire .cn and other domains.
UN sanctions are not imposed on bad state actors. They are imposed on weak state actors. UN sanctions have never been imposed on the US, China, Russia, Britain and France easily the worst state actors globally - the biggest weapons sellers and the cause of instability all over the world. They also are the 5 permanent security council members with veto power.
> I think we generally overestimate the hurt on the outside and underestimate the hurt on the inside considering the massive trade imbalance that China enjoys with the rest of the world.
China doesn't enjoy a trade imbalance with the "rest of the world". The enjoy it with the US primarily. They are net importers of Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, etc.
Germany, Japan, South Korea, etc also enjoy trade imbalance with the "rest of the world". Do you support sanctioning them?
> Personally I have already pi-holed entire .cn and other domains.
That doesn't do much if you really think about it. It's not like chinese individual, company or government are barred from owning everything from coms to orgs.
That is a great point and I agree with it.
However, the way I look at it, a state sponsored attack like this is no different from a country firing missiles or shells on another country from over the border. And as such, such attacks should not go unpunished and there need to be consequences. In addition, the countries being attached have a right and a moral duty to protect themselves.
The mechanisms of such I leave to those with the power to make it happen.
And yes, blocking .cn doesn't do much, but it does some.
We could potentially have sanctions that require Google to block commercial sites in China. That would definitely get their attention without massive financial implications on the economy.
This type of behavior CAN NOT be allowed to continue.
I’m sure this will garner plenty of whataboutism regarding how the west is imperfect (never minding that I didn’t say “the west”)...
There’s a limit to how much leverage any one side has on a sovereign countries policies (and how much they actually enforce them when they agree).
There’s also the question of the benefits of having China at all in these deals, some concessions and a growing dependence on western markets from initial deals is better than no deals.
Plus a wealthier China is good for the world and the billion people coming out of poverty, getting educated, and slowly becoming an advanced economy.
I’m not advocating for anyone controlling sovereign Chinese policies. They can continue their awful anti-humanitarian policies, fraud, IP theft, etc. I just don’t want my country aiding and abetting it. At very least I want my fellow citizens to be able to make informed purchasing decisions.
And I’m all for lifting people out of poverty, but I’d rather do it in a country with some minimum base line respect for human rights and integrity, and where my purchasing dollars don’t end up propping up some dictatorial system that bullies other countries.
And we’re I a citizen of the UK in this tortured analogy (with my contemporary morals and all that), I wouldn’t want my money supporting that.
> Any country will have hiccups throughout its development.
Right, but we don’t have to support those “hiccups”. Anyway, China had 60 million hiccups in the last century. They’re all out of hiccup passes.
> It's convenient but counterproductive to categorize every argument against yours as "whatabouttism".
Not every argument, only the ones that start with suggest I can’t criticize China until <other countries that I presumably support> are completely without blame. Such as yours.
The reality of China is that they need the global economy as much as the global economy needs them. No one entity can really pick up their ball and go home, as much as China would probably love to.