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Comment by jorgecastillo | Hacker News Reader

>There is an alternative for everything and they are better suited to Chinese culture too.

Well good for them, either way with this policy the Chinese government enforces, I don't think China will be able to compete internationally in the software industry.

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China is such a massive place that Chinese players in particular don't need to compete outside china. Two of the largest social networks, QZone and Sina Weibo at >645,000,000 and >500,000,000 users respectively are at the level where they're only smaller than facebook and they're used almost exclusively in one country.

You don't need to compete internationally when you can get that kind of userbase domestically, and the Great Firewall is absolutely and to some extent intentionally a big part of that.

Every Chinese programmer I know, and also all the technical people such as network admins, use a VPN routinely and openly now. That was not the case two years ago, when more Google services worked.

> I don't think China will be able to compete internationally in the software industry.

That is a very self-centered point of view, in recent european TED talks there were speakers like Mikko Hypponen from F-Secure, that there should be "european" versions of Google, Facebook, so we can avoid all the dragnet datamining etc. unethical web development solutions and NSA spying that somehow pass in the US.

If such products are created and succeed, it will be because they competed well with their American counterparts. The equivalent Chinese products don't face any competition at all.

Chinese companies will push to internationalise their products as the domestic internet market becomes saturated

Depends on how behind they are and how quickly they can adapt to western needs

http://www.fastcompany.com/3029119/most-innovative-companies...

Bear in mind that it won't just be Western markets they target.

To be fair, those products should be blocked in every country. I realize what the PRC is doing: blocking successful foreign corporations, then when they have sufficiently copied / provided for the local market, they expand. Quite duplicitous and I hope it fails miserably, no offense. I feel that the US government might be hesitant to allow Chinese companies, protected by the PRC, access to sensitive information on its citizens.

Point of fact, there is a lot of competition between companies inside of China. In many instances, there is more competition inside China than there is in the US.

So it would have nothing to do with all the legal quagmires the EU is currently trying to drag (e.g.) Google through, such as News in Spain, antitrust lawsuits, right-to-be-forgotten?

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