Also, China did not ban US companies, but requires all foreign companies abide Chinese laws when operate in China. Apple have setup their data centre in China, iCloud is not banned. Similar story to Bing search, AWS, Azure etc..
> China did not ban US companies
Blocking domains via a countrywide firewall is as close as you get to “banning”. If it was about following laws you’d enforce that through legal means like everyone else, and not brute force.
Eg, they do exist in Australia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Austral...), Japan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Japan) etc..
I agree with the thrust of your general argument, but feel it necessary to point out that the list of countries with substantial and automatic filtering mechanisms is much larger than that. Eg, I've experienced censorship in Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and India.
Legal means can still involve brute force; for example, when a court somewhere decides that a certain type of content is abhorrent and should be put on an automatic DNS blacklist that ISPs are required to use.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_surv...