As someone living blissfully unaware of the struggles people go through in countries with rampant government censorship -- sorry, control for the public good -- of the Internet, it was a bit a of a shock when I got some first-hand experience.
I had a customer that wanted to set up some web servers in China so that they could sign up students for some classes at their school.
At first I just assumed that this is a straightforward matter of selecting a Chinese region in a public cloud, deploying a couple of web servers, and we'd be done by lunch. Easy!
Turns out... that this is actually technically achievable, as long as: You have a Chinese business registered in China, you have a photo ID that you register with the "local authorities" (in person!), pay in Renminbi from a Chinese bank account, and read and write Chinese.
They want to make sure they have someone by the balls. It's either you personally, or someone willing to step up and take the risk of jailtime on your behalf if you publish anything the Grand Pooh Xi doesn't like.
Meanwhile, I can spin up a server in Dubai or South Africa or Brazil like... right now. No paperwork. No prostrating myself in front of the Police to beg for permission to be able to post government-approved content.
Meanwhile, on the map of AWS or Azure regions -- or on any CDNs map -- there's just a hole where China is. It's like those photos of Earth from space, where you can see the city lights glowing brightly everywhere except for North Korea, where there's just darkness.
Remind me, why do we do business with these people again? Why do we give them our money?
You have to get your ICP number registered by a Chinese national (like you say) and then display it on the footer of all your web pages (if you don't, your site will be taken down & you'll be fined). You've also got to store all data on Chinese citizens on a Chinese server.
And they don't mention this on that page, but for every publc IP you want to use in China, you have to re-submit your ICP filing/license paperwork, listing every public IP you will use, and what it is used for. So don't accidentally destroy your AWS load balancer, or you'll need to re-file all your paperwork before you can bring your site back up! (AWS load balancers can't be configured with static IPs)
> Remind me, why do we do business with these people again? Why do we give them our money?
Because then we get money. It's the largest "emerging" market in the world. If you have a product that makes 1 million dollars in the US, do some localization work and launch it in China, and you've doubled your money. Every major corporation is actively working on launching in China, because it's obvious that they're leaving money on the table by not being in China.
> As someone living blissfully unaware of the struggles people go through in countries with rampant government censorship
Where do you live? Because I know of no major country without rampant government censorship.
> They want to make sure they have someone by the balls. It's either you personally, or someone willing to step up and take the risk of jailtime on your behalf if you publish anything the Grand Pooh Xi doesn't like.
No offense but you make a good argument for why china restricts access. Your comment seems to come from a political operative than someone trying to spin up some web servers in china.
> Meanwhile, I can spin up a server in Dubai or South Africa or Brazil like... right now. No paperwork. No prostrating myself in front of the Police to beg for permission to be able to post government-approved content.
You make it sound like that's a good thing? It's not. Also, all those countries you listed have censorship...
> Remind me, why do we do business with these people again? Why do we give them our money?
I don't know. Why are you so desperate to do business in china? Shouldn't you be happy since you aren't doing business in china?
I don't understand people like you. You say we shouldn't do business with china. But you whine about not being able to do business in china.
> No offense but you make a good argument for why china restricts access.
Oh, I understand precisely why they do it. I don't think those reasons are good, and I don't like the GFW in general. This is the same criticism I level against the policies of North Korea, for example. The policies of NK are good for a small group of people in the "inner circle" of Kim Jong-un and no one else. Similarly, the current system in China is good for the people at the top of that system, and no one else.
> Why are you so desperate to do business in china?
I'm most certainly not desperate to do business in China. My customers are desperate, and I need to be able to provide services to them.
I have similar complaints about other limitations to smooth international trade and business. Some of these aren't even political.
- The lack of proper IPv6 support -- especially by cloud vendors -- makes it increasingly difficult to communicate with some areas of the world. Multiple layers of NAT aren't a permanent fix.
- No "regions" for the larger public clouds anywhere near central Africa or from Eastern Europe all the way to Siberia.
- Poor bandwidth even to some locations that are otherwise very friendly to foreign businesses. For example, Chennai had a submarine cable cut a few years ago that caused havoc for a bunch of my customers. Their outsourced staff just couldn't work half the day. It's not a politically motived firewall barrier, but a bandwidth barrier. The effect however is similar.
> Your comment seems to come from a political operative than someone trying to spin up some web servers in china.
Do you really believe this? Because this screams paranoia to me. I have no idea how you got from GP's comment to suggesting they might be a political operative. I am legitimately baffled by your conclusion. Please explain.
I may be unnecessarily cynical, but the only reason you can open up a server anywhere in the west is because you can be gotten by the balls anywhere in the west if you are breaking the laws here. And the issue with spam, child porn, tax evasion has the same probability of occurring in our world as the DNS breakthrough in theirs.
Of course the laws in China are different, but I don’t see why they would be less protective of those laws as we are, even though I would agree that I think that our world is better to live in than theirs.
This is a rational response if you look at it from a governance perspective.
Pre-GFW, the government was basically in a position where if there was anything illegal online (not just political stuff, but everything from gambling to piracy) they had no recourse. If they sent a takedown notice the company can basically say "why don't you make me".
So it makes total sense to require a local presence if you want to interact with the local market. The GFW in this case is a tool that the government can hit any company who doesn't comply with...
Frankly, the thing that really is worrying is that because this is so rational from an Internet governance perspective we might well see more and more countries follow this path... Not censorship per se but building up mechanisms to create a more fragmented Internet.
No? Even in a democracy laws need to be enforced and that has been really hard if a company violating local laws is not based locally.
It's the same problem why Russian ransomeware groups can roam free and piracy is hard to deal with online.
What the laws are, thats politics. How to enforce them is just a matter of technology.
What the GFW shows is a means to an end. You may not agree with the particular end in the case of China and the CCP (I don't either) but the means itself is a result of addressing a rational need that all governments have.
The danger of the GFW is not that China is using it for oppressive purposes. It's that it works and your local democracy may well also look to it to address the same need for governance it has.
Unless you're saying there's some going to be a "world government", different countries will continue to disagree on what is legal. And the path ahead is to either accept the impossibility of internet governance, or to build up more walls.
There is no difference between suppressing arbitrary content and suppressing illegal content. It doesn't matter if the decision to block comes from a dictator or the people's vote. The technology doesn't care. You either have the ability to block content or you don't.
There’s a huge difference between a point made in Realpolitik fashion vs saying it’s a norm.
It’s like having long discussions about how bad rape is vs dicussing actual policies how that could be resolved and saying that you can’t discuss policy because “it’s sounds too cold to my ears”.
This one-sided view lists only the pluses from the "governance perspective". It can have minuses for them too, depending on how their subjects and the rest of the world take it. Most of us belong to one of those two groups and can try to shade our actions accordingly.
Sure, but this technology has only been spreading in recent years. S. Korea blocks adult websites behind an ID check. India has also been shutting down Internet access around protests and the such. Even the FBI has seized domains by requiring ISPs redirect the DNS name resolution (for anti piracy cases), which is not that different from how half of the GFW works.
Action wise, I'm personally gonna stock up on a diverse set of VPN technologies... I don't see this trend being bucked any time soon by the trend of where politics is going.
I had a customer that wanted to set up some web servers in China so that they could sign up students for some classes at their school.
At first I just assumed that this is a straightforward matter of selecting a Chinese region in a public cloud, deploying a couple of web servers, and we'd be done by lunch. Easy!
Turns out... that this is actually technically achievable, as long as: You have a Chinese business registered in China, you have a photo ID that you register with the "local authorities" (in person!), pay in Renminbi from a Chinese bank account, and read and write Chinese.
No, really. That's the process. Really: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/china/overview-checkl...
They want to make sure they have someone by the balls. It's either you personally, or someone willing to step up and take the risk of jailtime on your behalf if you publish anything the Grand Pooh Xi doesn't like.
Meanwhile, I can spin up a server in Dubai or South Africa or Brazil like... right now. No paperwork. No prostrating myself in front of the Police to beg for permission to be able to post government-approved content.
Meanwhile, on the map of AWS or Azure regions -- or on any CDNs map -- there's just a hole where China is. It's like those photos of Earth from space, where you can see the city lights glowing brightly everywhere except for North Korea, where there's just darkness.
Remind me, why do we do business with these people again? Why do we give them our money?