you are not accepting third party cookies/javascript so for their purposes you may as well not exist, a condition I have zero qualms complying with by leaving.
So does Europe. Article 13 up for vote today and GDPR already passed. To quote the article, "Many of these elements serve a dual purpose: supporting domestic industry while further closing off the internet."
I think GDPR is mostly good, it is a lot of work, but so is protecting people's data. It is a law for individual's personal data. It is coming from the right place.
Article 13 is for copyright owners, not individuals. Large corporations benefit the most from this legislation.
The goal of GDPR is good, but I think the biggest issue people have with it is enforcing one countries laws in another country, where people following the regulations had no say in them (regulation without representation).
Also, if I'm reading it right, one of the provisions Article 27) is that if you are outside the EU, you need to hire someone inside the EU as a representative / contact point for GDPR issues. If I'm running a one-man business, there is no way that can happen.
The reason I'm concerned is that if I start a business providing support for one of my open source products, and have something like a web forum, well then I have user-generated content, so that would mean that I have to now hire someone in the EU to act as a point of contact.
Looking at the actual text, according to section 2(a) of GDPR Article 27†, a representative is not required in the cases of small or occasional operations. Basically, If you aren't a large corporation, it doesn't apply to you.
You still have to follow the majority of the Article but a representative is not required.
> if you are outside the EU, you need to hire someone inside the EU as a representative / contact point for GDPR issues.
And enforce this how? You get arrested upon setting foot in the EU when failing to do so? This would only work in Germany and maybe France. The EU doesn't have its own police, they rely on states cooperating. This is why Puigdemont is free to move in the EU (except Spain and Germany where he was arrested), despite of an arrest warrant issued in Spain.
Western companies filter out “hate speech”. Chinese companies do the same. In China, the definition of “hate speech” also includes anything that is critical of the government or Xi Jinping.
You ISP may not, but plenty of other filtering is going on on social media, YouTube, and all sorts of other sites. I say this without commentary on whether it's good or bad, but it is definitely happening.
This could be just the natural evolution of the internet. Early on the internet needed a global scope to reach a critical mass. These days a critical mass can be reached within a trading zone with not much (percentage wise) value added outside of that. Also because equipment continues to get cheaper the size of a viable critical mass is shrinking.
Every time I take a step back and look at what the internet is today I am simply amazed. That we could for once agree world wide on running this huge thing together involving almost every country in existence. Leaving (recent) developments like carrier grade Nat aside, we have a system that enables me to address anybody anywhere on this planet directly and send them a data packet that arrives within milliseconds.
I mean we had the same with phones or mail before but its still different because the Internet is technically decentralized. Anyone could fuck around badly with BGP, but it's mostly OK. DNS is completely optional or you could roll your own, but everyone participates.
With phones, you just need to agree on the country codes and everything that happens after that is everyone's own business. Mail even more so, you drop it off somewhere at the destination country and then it will involve varying amounts of manual processing to further distribute it. It just feels different.
I don't think it's accurate to consider the internet decentralized. Consider the entire domain name system is under ICANN control with a couple dozen root servers. Or the backbone which is almost entirely owned by Level3, Cogent, and a few other regional carriers.
Trading zones are hugely interconnected. It is not as if trading zones are just isolated islands that produce everything and where people never leave the trading zone.
Just like any established economy benefits from free trade (though slightly regulated to avoid dumping, etc.), established cultures benefit from free exchange of information (again slightly regulated to weed out some really bad stuff)
>These days a critical mass can be reached within a trading zone with not much (percentage wise) value added outside of that.
I'd argue it has more to do with language. The internet went global because English is a lingua franca across many different countries. There were lots of gains to be made by allowing it to work irrespective of national borders.
In contrast, the vast vaaast majority of cultural and economic activity being done in a Chinese language is being done under the PRC. Taiwan’s not big enough to compare and neither are the Chinese communities in SE Asia, the US, Australia, etc. (and among that latter group, they do quite a bit of their interaction in English anyway).
Eric Hobsbawm’s a political scientist who is considered an authority on the concept of Nationalism. One of his arguments was that the printing press created a sort of mass-media and standardization around specific languages that created a basis for people to develop a sense of community around what sort of vernacular language they read in. This was one of the progenitors behind the idea of “nationhood.” It’s why so many countries are constituted around common languages despite deep cultural divisions along other dimensions.
It is possible the internet might break the same way, creating an “Anglosphere,” a “Sinosphere,” a “Francosphere,” etc.
By requiring connections to be end-to-end encrypted (by pushing for HTTPS and other strong encryption methods), web architects have forced nations into an all-or-nothing position. They must completely control their slice of the internet, because otherwise they can't accomplish their goals. The future is fragmented, incompatible internets.
If protocols and services were designed instead to allow a measure of control at a high level, these nations could still do all the things they're going to do anyway, but allow the internet to remain open. For example, data wouldn't need to remain within a nation's borders if the nation still had control over it, at least within their own networks. They wouldn't have to create their own Facebook if they could manipulate Facebook inside their borders. You could still have cooperative compatible services, with controls where they were required.
I guess it's western ideals that make these suggestions sound horrible. But different countries are going to work differently - the fracturing of the internet and laws governing its use is the proof of that. You can choose your response: pick up your toys and go home, or make concessions so that everyone can use the same toys.
Actually the free world is all non-Communist countries. It's a propaganda term invented by the west (literally they were interchangeable, "free world" and "western world"). You can still see this influence as the use of the phrase "the leader of the free world" is exclusively held for the President of the United States.
The "free world" as a broader idea is still kind of useless in the modern world. Your government may not have made end-to-end encryption illegal (yet) but as private corporations actually run everything that people use, they get to impose their own will and determine your practical "freedom". There's no law preventing Apple from changing its encryption technology.
This is just boosterism and willfully ignoring the facts. Of course you can stop math: you just Balkanize the internet and jail people inside the wall who don't follow the rules. Which is what China is doing.
Those that know their history better could expand upon this, but isn't this what happened in the late 1800s and early 1900s where globalization peaked and then gave way to nationalism/protectionism ?
Perhaps we're just dealing with a natural cycle of trade expansion followed by protectionism.
I think you misunderstood me. What I'm saying is that perhaps we are in the fighting portion of the cycle where free trade has reached some extreme where individual nations feel like they need to rein it in a bit in order to retain their autonomy.
This isn't totally bad. China has shown that it is possible to both offer an environment that fosters startups and online communities operating to their maximum creative potential while policing for things that incite hate, forms of bigotry, and ideas that create dangerous divisions. While China isn't perfect, I wouldn't mind if America was made less influential when it comes to the Internet.
Those dangerous free speechers and their divisive "ideas". If only everyone just went along with the official Communist party positions, the world would obviously be a much more peaceful and orderly place.
Hey, at least they are trying to suppress democracy more proactively now, so they don't have to mow down pro-democracy protesters with guns and run over them with takes and make corpse pancakes.
A clear and present danger. Youth are being exposed and educated to a much higher level today. They know full well the uselessness of such dogma and warped thinking.
>Is that a euphemism for “anything the Communist party dislikes”?
You're right in the sense that anything censored in china is tautologically the things the communist party doesn't like.
But the language you're keying into is just the astroturfer borrowing the language that Silicon Valley progressives use to push for their own flavor of "it's OK when we do it" internet censorship.
By trying to make governments irrelevant, the big internet companies will end up in the bin of history. I would say that it is understandable that China or the EU are not happy to see how their tax revenue is siphoned out to the US (in the best scenario) or to fiscal paradises (in the worst case).
A supra-national level of organization is desirable, with open networks and a global community, but not the way we are doing it right now: currently a handful of companies are amassing all the power, benefitting a very small minority of workers (SV), collecting private information worldwide and providing that information to the US government. It is not even illegal, as Snowden thankfully revealed: US laws do not protect foreign nationals against eavesdropping.
What else can we, in the rest of the world, do? Since the behemoth is profitting from the global network but not contributing to its fairness, the only option left is to break it up, and take care of our piece of the network.
The other, better option, would be to regulate all this at the supra-national level. Sadly, we are entering a phase of nationalism, and that battle is already lost.
I'm not sure Google, Facebook and the like are actively trying to make government irrelevant or heading for the bin for that reason. Their core stuff of providing search results or updates of what your friends are up to are kind of separate from the core duties of governments of making laws.
I agree the tax situation is a problem and think govenments should change the tax laws. Countries could estimate a fair tax for each multinational and tell them pay it or be blocked. Its not really the problem of the CEOs who can only really pay the tax required by law.
GDPR seems something of a success at regulating things supra-national level if not perfect.
> This alternative would include technical standards requiring foreign companies to build versions of their products compliant with Chinese standards, and pressure to comply with government surveillance policies. It would require data to be stored on servers in-country and restrict transfer of data outside China without government permission. It would also permit government agencies and critical infrastructure systems to source only from local suppliers.
That is the trend in the EU and US as well. Cyber protectionism, more or less.
To be crystal clear: a nation's critical infrastructure that is produced or designed in places which are neutral or quasi-hostile to that nation is suspect. It's perfectly reasonable for China to want its critical infrastructure supply chain local.
It's also perfectly reasonable to mandate that products sold in China be compliant with Chinese standards.
The open question is what constitutes "transfer of data". And, to again be crystal clear: China is notorious for abuse of human rights and for being at the forefront of applied digital surveillance of its citizens. Which is a shame.
> we cannot take for granted that the internet will remain a place of free expression where open markets can flourish.
The internet has not been a place of genuinely free expression for something like a decade now; platform operators set boundaries. Note that open markets are disjunct from free expression.
> . At a roundtable in Dar es Salaam sponsored by Beijing, Edwin Ngonyani, Tanzania’s deputy minister for transport and communications, explained, “Our Chinese friends have managed to block such media in their country and replaced them with their homegrown sites that are safe, constructive, and popular.” Among other countries where China invests heavily, Nigeria has adopted measures requiring that consumer data be hosted in Nigeria, while Egypt has pending legislation that would mandate ride-sharing companies to store data in-country while also making it more accessible to authorities. Chinese partners like Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt engage in aggressive online content control.
Notice that there are benefits here: citizens' data is being stored in a country where they have jurisdiction to sue over misuse. I consider that a Good Thing. But censorship, again, is problematic. The desire to be an individual entails being wanting to able to say and write what you desire, regardless of the government's censorship (and China does have people who want this- it is not special in this regard!)
> foundational principles of the internet in market-based democracies:
how disgusting a word choice! we're not liberal (free) democracies, we're market (to be bought and sold) democracies.
Mmm- no, I don't think that's how this works. You're dodging the question.
(markets have multiple definitions. a bazaar or person to person trade has existed as an independent variable of governance. a stock market ("the market" usually referred to in these sorts of articles) exists today in a wide variety of modern governance, from authoritarian to liberal. Arguably Athens had a liberal democracy, but no stock market)
I'm not. Every liberal democracy I know of has a market economy.
> a stock market ("the market" usually referred to in these sorts of articles)
Why should "markets" refer exclusively to stock markets? What about the most essential type of market: commodities? Markets have existed for millenia, since humans began to trade.
> exists today in a wide variety of modern governance, from authoritarian to liberal
I didn't say liberal democracy is a prerequisite for markets (and I don't think it is). I said markets are a prerequisite for liberal democracy.
> Arguably Athens had a liberal democracy, but no stock market
But they had markets, which agrees with what I said. In fact, ancient Athens engaged extensively in trade. It's one of the major reasons it became an important center of culture, arts, and philosophy.
Europe has been rewriting the rules of the internet for a while. It's amazing how europe/EU is getting a pass when it comes to censorship. Not to mention what our corporations and our media have been doing.
The problems with the internet isn't china. It's our media and our government but for some odd reason, all I hear is "china/beijing".
Is beijing the reason why there is so much censorship? Is beijing the reason why google search is so terrible? Is it beijing why there is so much censorship of the social media and the rest of the internet in the west? Of course not. The real reason is News Corp, NYTimes, WashingtonPost, The Atlantic along with corporate america and their stooges in the government.
Try googling anything. Half of the frontpage is now links to nytimes, washingtonpost, cnn and rest of the media.
I remember googling for yanny vs laurel not too long ago. Do you know what the top result was? A nytimes article. It wasn't the original instagram post. It wasn't the reddit post that made it go viral. It was a nytimes post. And almost all the results on the first page of google were links to news companies. I've been using google search since the late 90s. It's pathetic what google search has become. Youtube is going down the same path.
I'd take the atlantic a bit more seriously if they did an article about themselves or the rest of the media in regards to the rewriting of the rules of the internet. The biggest supporters of censorship and destruction of the internet is the media in the west.
This is whataboutism. Nothing the West does compares to China's firewall and blanket surveillance, even if we stipulate we live in a corporatocracy and include the private surveillance of Facebook, Google, et al (which would make for an unfair comparison). I'm no apologist for the West's behavior or any of the things you point out, but let's not try and minimize the human rights violations China's committing -- and actually proud of, for what it's worth.
> I knew the top comment would be whataboutism, it is what the diversion artists have been trained to do.
You brought up whataboutism. So are you a diversion artist?
How about this. I'm american. I don't really care about what happens in china. I'm just sick of "our" media distracting from what really affects me with nonsense about china.
I would really be interested on what your agenda is. It's funny how the two replies to my comment is about whataboutism. And the replies read like copy and paste spam.
You did whataboutism; JohnJamesRambo brought in the term (as did camgunz).
> I don't really care about what happens in china. I'm just sick of "our" media distracting from what really affects me with nonsense about china.
HN runs plenty of articles about tech companies knowing way too much about us. It runs plenty of articles about government surveillance in the US (and the rest of the West). We talk about those things a lot, and we care about them a lot. But we can talk about other things, too, and this article is about China. How about letting those of us who care talk about China, rather than trying to derail the conversation? There will be another article about the stuff you care about tomorrow, if not sooner. Feel free to join in the discussion on that one when it comes.
> I would really be interested on what your agenda is.
Maybe the agenda is to be able to have a conversation about a topic, without the conversation getting hijacked?
> It's funny how the two replies to my comment is about whataboutism.
That's because this article is about China, not about the US or Europe. What you did is exactly whataboutism.
> You did whataboutism; JohnJamesRambo brought in the term (as did camgunz).
No I didn't. If I did, I would be excusing china's behavior. But I'm not. What I am saying is that china isn't rewriting the rules, I'm saying the US and EU are rewriting the rules of the internet. Maybe china can rewrite the rules within their "intra"net, but that isn't affecting me or anyone else around the world. EU's vote tomorrow,
has far greater impact on the internet than anything china could do.
> Maybe the agenda is to be able to have a conversation about a topic, without the conversation getting hijacked?
But my point was on topic. I was rejecting the notion that china is rewriting the rules of the internet.
But for some odd reason, anytime someone disagrees with the clickbaiting media, a few accounts start accusing you of whataboutism or even russian botting. The "whataboutism" response has already been exposed as a standard brigading technique by political groups/media on reddit, facebook and most of social media. It's 2015/2016 that nobody uses anymore because it's been exposed as propaganda. It's shocking to see it on hacker news, but we are always late to the party I guess.
> That's because this article is about China, not about the US or Europe. What you did is exactly whataboutism.
No. The article is about the rules of the internet. The bit about china is just propaganda to distract from the EU vote tomorrow. The fact that I disagreed with the major point of the article isn't whataboutism. It's the truth. The threat to the internet isn't from china, who are pretty much confined to their own national intranet. The threat is from corporations, the media and the wealthy who want to control the internet.
You know the people supporting and voting for more censorship and control tomorrow.
> No. The article is about the rules of the internet. The bit about china is just propaganda to distract from the EU vote tomorrow.
The article is almost totally about China and the rules of the internet. The only way you can say "the bit about China is just propaganda" is to say that the whole article is just propaganda. I suspect that you actually believe that, but I think you're wrong.
China wants to totally change the rules of the internet. The EU is also wanting to change the rules, in a less total but more immediate way. We can and should talk about both those things, rather than saying that China is "just propaganda to distract us".
By all means, talk about the EU. Really. But China is also a danger, and we need to also talk about that danger.
GP was not complaining about HN, but the media companies that report on Chinese censorship while at the same time stoking moral panics, proliferating biased hitpieces on people and entities spreading ideas they dislike, and practically begging tech companies and western governments to censor and regulate the internet.
That is the whataboutism at hand here: "Yes we want to censor, ban, and shame you for our own reasons, but hey...look over there at China! Scary!"
Mentioning "whataboutism" should IMO be labelled as logical fallacy. Not once have I seen it used as a valid counterargument. Instead, it's always the same pattern: person A states a problem, person B points out that it's non-problem distracting attention from the core of the issue, and then person B gets accused of "whataboutism"...
The NYTimes article on yanny/laurel [1] was quite good, though: it included a tool with a slider that applied a pitch shift and frequency gain to the sound clip in order to bias it towards either "yanny" or "laurel". This let people hear both words even if their brain could only hear one of the interpretations of the original clip, and it was interesting to experiment with how much shift was needed to make it cross over. (Personally, I beat them to it :) – when I first heard of the clip, I uploaded a quick YouTube video for some people that just pitch shifted the original up and down, which is enough to make the interpretation cross over. But the interactive slider is better.) There was also a spectrogram visualization. Besides that, the main article had a thorough explanation of the origins of the clip, quotes from several different researchers about how the illusion worked, and other bits of relevant context. All in all, I'd call it high-quality reporting, and I don't see any problem with it ranking high on Google.
> It's our media and our government but for some odd reason, all I hear is "china/beijing".
That's interesting. It sounds like there might kind of cognitive/perceptual phenomenon here, where one person might hear "the EU is just as bad as China when it comes to internet freedoms" and another might hear "the EU wants consumer data protection."
I imagine there's some research and maybe even a model about how these kinds of perceptual differences happen, but the primary way of getting awareness out would probably be for some large media outlets to write something enlightening about that for their audience.
Today computers like imacs, ipads, mobile phones or tvs(not even talking about Alexa), clocks could spy on you in your house at every single time and give the data back to home at the other side of the globe.
Your pulse could be monitored, your movement could be monitored, who you talk with privately could be monitored, who you sleep with could be monitored.
Once this is possible it is a temptation so great for the US Government(or any other Govertment) and status quo to resist.
It is only a matter of time that Governments react. Of course the other powers of the wold want to do what the US Govertment already does.
Massive surveillance spying using technology created by companies of the same country? Already done by the US.
Protecting sensitive data from outside Governments? Already done by the US.
Restricting companies from working in strategic sectors and forcing them to provide source code? Already done by the US.
> Once this is possible it is a temptation so great for the US Government(or any other Govertment) and status quo to resist
You emphasized Government but most surveillance in countries like the U.S. and Australia/NZ is done by the status quo of self-styled "community leaders" spread across business, media, academia, religion, sports, and government. They informally network with one another in bar drink ups, legal war rooms, and prayer meetings, as well as surveil their targets and disseminate their messages via misled employees. Workers at internet providers, government departments, and vehicle leasing businesses provide customer data to associates and "friends" all the time, and a wide variety of channels such as news stories, entertainment, and social media are used to spread manufactured narratives. When you add the extent of this informal network to the formal U.S. government surveillance and interference, it could equal the extent of China's. Such American and Australian actors also frequently network with their "Chinese counterparts".
There's nothing mentioned in this article that's either a new type of strategy or anything limited to China.
Three objectives:
1. legitimate desire to address substantial cybersecurity challenges, like defending against cyber attacks and keeping stolen personal data off the black market
2. support domestic industry, in order to wean the government off its dependence on foreign technology components for certain IT products deemed essential to economic and national security
3. expand Beijing’s power to surveil and control the dissemination of economic, social, and political information online
Replace Beijing with <country's capital city> in #3 and all of those points sound like what Western countries are doing. There's nothing noteworthy in those three points. What's noteworthy is that #3 is becoming prevalent in countries that consider themselves 'free'.
Other things listed, such as employing people to manipulate content, is done elsewhere, but it's done by private companies rather than 'the state'. Not new, but the singular direction makes this stand out in a 1984 way. The Tanzania example is just a modernised version of the US' manifest destiny behaviour in Central America and other 'strategic' nations (cough Ukraine cough).
Where China is a leader, others are (often hypocritically) following. Where they're a follower, the leading has been done by the West.
"China’s control-driven model defies international openness, interoperability, and collaboration, the foundations of global internet governance and, ultimately, of the internet itself."
Replace China with "Facebook" or "Google" or even "Apple" or "Microsoft" and the sentence still rings true. Singularly calling China out smells like fairly blatant propaganda.
Openness, interoperability, and collaboration are utopian ideals of the Internet that were achieved when the Internet was a network of universities and scientific institutions back in the late 80's, up until "view your trolley / Checkout" was a thing. Profit is what's re-written the Rules of the Internet. Why else would it be so full of ads?
SESTA & GDPR just did. I'm generally in favor of the ideas of GDPR but these countries are all imposing ridiculous constraints that crush & quell the very small would be's & gdpr especially is vulgarly pathetically unilateral. But SESTA is truly vile. Some safe harbor is required & the US fucking wrecked it. That China wants to rewrite is a comedy compared to what the west did in two thousand fucking eighteen. Lordy lordy do have mercy we got proper fucked by the rules rewrites this year.
> One is a legitimate desire to address substantial cybersecurity challenges, like defending against cyber attacks and keeping stolen personal data off the black market.
Haha, that’s BS. You can buy personal data very cheaply in China - from gov officials.
71 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] thread" Looks like you are offline
You'll need to check back here once you have restored your connection. Thanks for your patience. "
But you're clearly online if you can see the error message....
[0] https://saveyourinternet.eu/home
[1] https://juliareda.eu/2018/06/the-internet-after-axel-voss/
Article 13 is for copyright owners, not individuals. Large corporations benefit the most from this legislation.
Also, if I'm reading it right, one of the provisions Article 27) is that if you are outside the EU, you need to hire someone inside the EU as a representative / contact point for GDPR issues. If I'm running a one-man business, there is no way that can happen.
The reason I'm concerned is that if I start a business providing support for one of my open source products, and have something like a web forum, well then I have user-generated content, so that would mean that I have to now hire someone in the EU to act as a point of contact.
You still have to follow the majority of the Article but a representative is not required.
† http://www.privacy-regulation.eu/en/27.htm
And enforce this how? You get arrested upon setting foot in the EU when failing to do so? This would only work in Germany and maybe France. The EU doesn't have its own police, they rely on states cooperating. This is why Puigdemont is free to move in the EU (except Spain and Germany where he was arrested), despite of an arrest warrant issued in Spain.
I mean we had the same with phones or mail before but its still different because the Internet is technically decentralized. Anyone could fuck around badly with BGP, but it's mostly OK. DNS is completely optional or you could roll your own, but everyone participates.
With phones, you just need to agree on the country codes and everything that happens after that is everyone's own business. Mail even more so, you drop it off somewhere at the destination country and then it will involve varying amounts of manual processing to further distribute it. It just feels different.
Redundant is nice, but it's not decentralized.
:)
Just like any established economy benefits from free trade (though slightly regulated to avoid dumping, etc.), established cultures benefit from free exchange of information (again slightly regulated to weed out some really bad stuff)
I'd argue it has more to do with language. The internet went global because English is a lingua franca across many different countries. There were lots of gains to be made by allowing it to work irrespective of national borders.
In contrast, the vast vaaast majority of cultural and economic activity being done in a Chinese language is being done under the PRC. Taiwan’s not big enough to compare and neither are the Chinese communities in SE Asia, the US, Australia, etc. (and among that latter group, they do quite a bit of their interaction in English anyway).
Eric Hobsbawm’s a political scientist who is considered an authority on the concept of Nationalism. One of his arguments was that the printing press created a sort of mass-media and standardization around specific languages that created a basis for people to develop a sense of community around what sort of vernacular language they read in. This was one of the progenitors behind the idea of “nationhood.” It’s why so many countries are constituted around common languages despite deep cultural divisions along other dimensions. It is possible the internet might break the same way, creating an “Anglosphere,” a “Sinosphere,” a “Francosphere,” etc.
If protocols and services were designed instead to allow a measure of control at a high level, these nations could still do all the things they're going to do anyway, but allow the internet to remain open. For example, data wouldn't need to remain within a nation's borders if the nation still had control over it, at least within their own networks. They wouldn't have to create their own Facebook if they could manipulate Facebook inside their borders. You could still have cooperative compatible services, with controls where they were required.
I guess it's western ideals that make these suggestions sound horrible. But different countries are going to work differently - the fracturing of the internet and laws governing its use is the proof of that. You can choose your response: pick up your toys and go home, or make concessions so that everyone can use the same toys.
The "free world" as a broader idea is still kind of useless in the modern world. Your government may not have made end-to-end encryption illegal (yet) but as private corporations actually run everything that people use, they get to impose their own will and determine your practical "freedom". There's no law preventing Apple from changing its encryption technology.
Perhaps we're just dealing with a natural cycle of trade expansion followed by protectionism.
Is that a euphemism for “anything the Communist party dislikes”?
You're right in the sense that anything censored in china is tautologically the things the communist party doesn't like.
But the language you're keying into is just the astroturfer borrowing the language that Silicon Valley progressives use to push for their own flavor of "it's OK when we do it" internet censorship.
A supra-national level of organization is desirable, with open networks and a global community, but not the way we are doing it right now: currently a handful of companies are amassing all the power, benefitting a very small minority of workers (SV), collecting private information worldwide and providing that information to the US government. It is not even illegal, as Snowden thankfully revealed: US laws do not protect foreign nationals against eavesdropping.
What else can we, in the rest of the world, do? Since the behemoth is profitting from the global network but not contributing to its fairness, the only option left is to break it up, and take care of our piece of the network.
The other, better option, would be to regulate all this at the supra-national level. Sadly, we are entering a phase of nationalism, and that battle is already lost.
I agree the tax situation is a problem and think govenments should change the tax laws. Countries could estimate a fair tax for each multinational and tell them pay it or be blocked. Its not really the problem of the CEOs who can only really pay the tax required by law.
GDPR seems something of a success at regulating things supra-national level if not perfect.
That is the trend in the EU and US as well. Cyber protectionism, more or less.
To be crystal clear: a nation's critical infrastructure that is produced or designed in places which are neutral or quasi-hostile to that nation is suspect. It's perfectly reasonable for China to want its critical infrastructure supply chain local.
It's also perfectly reasonable to mandate that products sold in China be compliant with Chinese standards.
The open question is what constitutes "transfer of data". And, to again be crystal clear: China is notorious for abuse of human rights and for being at the forefront of applied digital surveillance of its citizens. Which is a shame.
> we cannot take for granted that the internet will remain a place of free expression where open markets can flourish.
The internet has not been a place of genuinely free expression for something like a decade now; platform operators set boundaries. Note that open markets are disjunct from free expression.
> . At a roundtable in Dar es Salaam sponsored by Beijing, Edwin Ngonyani, Tanzania’s deputy minister for transport and communications, explained, “Our Chinese friends have managed to block such media in their country and replaced them with their homegrown sites that are safe, constructive, and popular.” Among other countries where China invests heavily, Nigeria has adopted measures requiring that consumer data be hosted in Nigeria, while Egypt has pending legislation that would mandate ride-sharing companies to store data in-country while also making it more accessible to authorities. Chinese partners like Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt engage in aggressive online content control.
Notice that there are benefits here: citizens' data is being stored in a country where they have jurisdiction to sue over misuse. I consider that a Good Thing. But censorship, again, is problematic. The desire to be an individual entails being wanting to able to say and write what you desire, regardless of the government's censorship (and China does have people who want this- it is not special in this regard!)
> foundational principles of the internet in market-based democracies:
how disgusting a word choice! we're not liberal (free) democracies, we're market (to be bought and sold) democracies.
That is an assertion, and my recollection of history suggests that is not the case. Would you mind backing that up?
(markets have multiple definitions. a bazaar or person to person trade has existed as an independent variable of governance. a stock market ("the market" usually referred to in these sorts of articles) exists today in a wide variety of modern governance, from authoritarian to liberal. Arguably Athens had a liberal democracy, but no stock market)
How what works?
> You're dodging the question.
I'm not. Every liberal democracy I know of has a market economy.
> a stock market ("the market" usually referred to in these sorts of articles)
Why should "markets" refer exclusively to stock markets? What about the most essential type of market: commodities? Markets have existed for millenia, since humans began to trade.
> exists today in a wide variety of modern governance, from authoritarian to liberal
I didn't say liberal democracy is a prerequisite for markets (and I don't think it is). I said markets are a prerequisite for liberal democracy.
> Arguably Athens had a liberal democracy, but no stock market
But they had markets, which agrees with what I said. In fact, ancient Athens engaged extensively in trade. It's one of the major reasons it became an important center of culture, arts, and philosophy.
The problems with the internet isn't china. It's our media and our government but for some odd reason, all I hear is "china/beijing".
Is beijing the reason why there is so much censorship? Is beijing the reason why google search is so terrible? Is it beijing why there is so much censorship of the social media and the rest of the internet in the west? Of course not. The real reason is News Corp, NYTimes, WashingtonPost, The Atlantic along with corporate america and their stooges in the government.
Try googling anything. Half of the frontpage is now links to nytimes, washingtonpost, cnn and rest of the media.
I remember googling for yanny vs laurel not too long ago. Do you know what the top result was? A nytimes article. It wasn't the original instagram post. It wasn't the reddit post that made it go viral. It was a nytimes post. And almost all the results on the first page of google were links to news companies. I've been using google search since the late 90s. It's pathetic what google search has become. Youtube is going down the same path.
I'd take the atlantic a bit more seriously if they did an article about themselves or the rest of the media in regards to the rewriting of the rules of the internet. The biggest supporters of censorship and destruction of the internet is the media in the west.
Let's fix our system before we go grand-standing about China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
You brought up whataboutism. So are you a diversion artist?
How about this. I'm american. I don't really care about what happens in china. I'm just sick of "our" media distracting from what really affects me with nonsense about china.
I would really be interested on what your agenda is. It's funny how the two replies to my comment is about whataboutism. And the replies read like copy and paste spam.
> I don't really care about what happens in china. I'm just sick of "our" media distracting from what really affects me with nonsense about china.
HN runs plenty of articles about tech companies knowing way too much about us. It runs plenty of articles about government surveillance in the US (and the rest of the West). We talk about those things a lot, and we care about them a lot. But we can talk about other things, too, and this article is about China. How about letting those of us who care talk about China, rather than trying to derail the conversation? There will be another article about the stuff you care about tomorrow, if not sooner. Feel free to join in the discussion on that one when it comes.
> I would really be interested on what your agenda is.
Maybe the agenda is to be able to have a conversation about a topic, without the conversation getting hijacked?
> It's funny how the two replies to my comment is about whataboutism.
That's because this article is about China, not about the US or Europe. What you did is exactly whataboutism.
No I didn't. If I did, I would be excusing china's behavior. But I'm not. What I am saying is that china isn't rewriting the rules, I'm saying the US and EU are rewriting the rules of the internet. Maybe china can rewrite the rules within their "intra"net, but that isn't affecting me or anyone else around the world. EU's vote tomorrow,
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/internet-luminaries-ri...
has far greater impact on the internet than anything china could do.
> Maybe the agenda is to be able to have a conversation about a topic, without the conversation getting hijacked?
But my point was on topic. I was rejecting the notion that china is rewriting the rules of the internet.
But for some odd reason, anytime someone disagrees with the clickbaiting media, a few accounts start accusing you of whataboutism or even russian botting. The "whataboutism" response has already been exposed as a standard brigading technique by political groups/media on reddit, facebook and most of social media. It's 2015/2016 that nobody uses anymore because it's been exposed as propaganda. It's shocking to see it on hacker news, but we are always late to the party I guess.
> That's because this article is about China, not about the US or Europe. What you did is exactly whataboutism.
No. The article is about the rules of the internet. The bit about china is just propaganda to distract from the EU vote tomorrow. The fact that I disagreed with the major point of the article isn't whataboutism. It's the truth. The threat to the internet isn't from china, who are pretty much confined to their own national intranet. The threat is from corporations, the media and the wealthy who want to control the internet.
You know the people supporting and voting for more censorship and control tomorrow.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/internet-luminaries-ri...
The article is almost totally about China and the rules of the internet. The only way you can say "the bit about China is just propaganda" is to say that the whole article is just propaganda. I suspect that you actually believe that, but I think you're wrong.
China wants to totally change the rules of the internet. The EU is also wanting to change the rules, in a less total but more immediate way. We can and should talk about both those things, rather than saying that China is "just propaganda to distract us".
By all means, talk about the EU. Really. But China is also a danger, and we need to also talk about that danger.
That is the whataboutism at hand here: "Yes we want to censor, ban, and shame you for our own reasons, but hey...look over there at China! Scary!"
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/science/yanny-laurel.html
That's interesting. It sounds like there might kind of cognitive/perceptual phenomenon here, where one person might hear "the EU is just as bad as China when it comes to internet freedoms" and another might hear "the EU wants consumer data protection."
I imagine there's some research and maybe even a model about how these kinds of perceptual differences happen, but the primary way of getting awareness out would probably be for some large media outlets to write something enlightening about that for their audience.
Today computers like imacs, ipads, mobile phones or tvs(not even talking about Alexa), clocks could spy on you in your house at every single time and give the data back to home at the other side of the globe.
Your pulse could be monitored, your movement could be monitored, who you talk with privately could be monitored, who you sleep with could be monitored.
Once this is possible it is a temptation so great for the US Government(or any other Govertment) and status quo to resist.
It is only a matter of time that Governments react. Of course the other powers of the wold want to do what the US Govertment already does.
Massive surveillance spying using technology created by companies of the same country? Already done by the US.
Protecting sensitive data from outside Governments? Already done by the US.
Restricting companies from working in strategic sectors and forcing them to provide source code? Already done by the US.
You emphasized Government but most surveillance in countries like the U.S. and Australia/NZ is done by the status quo of self-styled "community leaders" spread across business, media, academia, religion, sports, and government. They informally network with one another in bar drink ups, legal war rooms, and prayer meetings, as well as surveil their targets and disseminate their messages via misled employees. Workers at internet providers, government departments, and vehicle leasing businesses provide customer data to associates and "friends" all the time, and a wide variety of channels such as news stories, entertainment, and social media are used to spread manufactured narratives. When you add the extent of this informal network to the formal U.S. government surveillance and interference, it could equal the extent of China's. Such American and Australian actors also frequently network with their "Chinese counterparts".
You didn't make fun of the parent comment in the same way. Why is that?
Three objectives:
1. legitimate desire to address substantial cybersecurity challenges, like defending against cyber attacks and keeping stolen personal data off the black market
2. support domestic industry, in order to wean the government off its dependence on foreign technology components for certain IT products deemed essential to economic and national security
3. expand Beijing’s power to surveil and control the dissemination of economic, social, and political information online
Replace Beijing with <country's capital city> in #3 and all of those points sound like what Western countries are doing. There's nothing noteworthy in those three points. What's noteworthy is that #3 is becoming prevalent in countries that consider themselves 'free'.
Other things listed, such as employing people to manipulate content, is done elsewhere, but it's done by private companies rather than 'the state'. Not new, but the singular direction makes this stand out in a 1984 way. The Tanzania example is just a modernised version of the US' manifest destiny behaviour in Central America and other 'strategic' nations (cough Ukraine cough).
Where China is a leader, others are (often hypocritically) following. Where they're a follower, the leading has been done by the West.
"China’s control-driven model defies international openness, interoperability, and collaboration, the foundations of global internet governance and, ultimately, of the internet itself."
Replace China with "Facebook" or "Google" or even "Apple" or "Microsoft" and the sentence still rings true. Singularly calling China out smells like fairly blatant propaganda.
Openness, interoperability, and collaboration are utopian ideals of the Internet that were achieved when the Internet was a network of universities and scientific institutions back in the late 80's, up until "view your trolley / Checkout" was a thing. Profit is what's re-written the Rules of the Internet. Why else would it be so full of ads?
The nation states have just followed the money.
Haha, that’s BS. You can buy personal data very cheaply in China - from gov officials.
Communist scum.