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.
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.