A concern is that if ever your product on this platform gets big, friction with the (often unpredictable) Chinese gov and policies will become a liability.
example : your product displays news. Some of these might considered not acceptable by the Chinese govt and cause you to get shut down or blocked
Any content hosted outside China is very slow for chinese users. So if you're serious about serving content in Mainland China, you will first need to obtain an ICP license. Only then you will be able to use the Mainland CDN and cloud instances.
And pretty much everything useful is blocked. We rolled out an update that broke our app for all of China, because cloudfront was blocked. That was a new one for me.
Having spent a painfully slow 10 hours in the airport in Beijing let me appreciate just how much of the Internet breaks when you block the biggest sites. Serve up jQuery through googleapis.com? Not in China, you don't. Hope it wasn't doing any heavy lifting for you.
That is categorically false. Chinese communism is strongly influenced by nationalism and protectionism comes from that but make no mistake that their goal is censorship.
They could easily force foreign companies to operate under a strong censorship regime if that were their main goal. Facebook basically bends to the will of every market it operates in.
However they clearly prefer local startups and makes it generally difficult for foreign companies to purely exploit the Chinese market. Joint ventures are always required at the least.
Sources tell me that the azure infrastructure there are not actually operated by microsoft, but by a subcontractor, and merely licenses the name from microsoft. I would be quite wary of assuming that microsoft policies apply there.
Yes, it's more likely in China because it's more likely to happen in a blatant way, especially between companies directly.
But don't kid yourselves that the US intelligence would never pass on trade secrets or confidential information to benefit American competitors. Especially if you consider that they've actually sabotaged foreign companies because of business relations to countries the US doesn't like.
FWIW: I would never put confidential information on Chinese infra. But as a non-American I'm only slightly less worried about doing the same with American infra. It's not so much about whether someone will access your confidential information, it's more about who they are.
Are you kidding? Spying to see if they're violating trade embargoes == Systemic, blatant IP theft from westerners--aided at all levels of the Chinese government and industries?
Heh, you're using a throw away account just to go full whataboutism on this comment thread. So brave.
I might defend the wrong side here, but industrial espionage was a significant part of the NSA scandal. Of course the US agencies are going to give the data they get by siphoning the global internet traffic and by hacking foreign industries to their own domestic industries. And we know that Asia was highly targeted, especially Japan, but also China.
Sure, China might be more blatant about that and do it on a higher level, but the US lost all rights to be on the moral high ground with things like that. The US got zero protection for user data. They do read your personal mail and they listen and watch via your webcam silently into your home. Does not get much worse than that.
Can you give any example of where the US has been caught giving IP stolen from espionage, to a domestic business purely to give the business a better advantage? Where there the IP had no military or security value?
If they did this, which company benefited? Did all domestic companies in the same business get the same deal or only that one single lucky one?
Just look at their systemic counterfeit, ip theft problem. They can somehow keep a billion people in line and censored and behind a firewall and complacent, but stopping major counterfeit and up theft seems beyond their reach. (hint, it's not, they just don't care).
The US won't "protect Americans" if by that you mean "not violate their rights and abuse their data", but that's beside the point.
I'm neither Chinese nor American. While it's obvious why China is not trustworthy (i.e. rampant product piracy) the bar is not so high that it matters whether the Americans or the Chinese are abusing my customers' data as long as there's a third option. Granted, even when hosting locally it's known that American agencies might be able to access that data and it would be prudent to assume China (or Russia, seeing how they're the more trendy Big Bad these days) couldn't do the same. But at least I'm not wrapping everything up with a ribbon and leaving it at their doorstep.
I'm less concerned about Chinese knock-offs sold locally but Chinese companies have a deserved reputation for trying to sell illegal knock-offs internationally with little regard for the IP they're violating in those countries.
Also China has a reputation for not just having companies copy successful designs but actively going out and exfiltrating information to clone them (e.g. companies producing parts in China for Western companies turning around and producing knock-offs of those parts themselves, sometimes even branding them identically).
Regardless of the case by case legality, it's obvious why this behavior is likely undesirable for most Western companies seeking a cloud provider rather than specifically a Chinese cloud provider.
[0]: Obvious caveat: it's not strictly international, but most countries have agreed on cooperating under the terms of the Berne Convention and the UCC. So for most intents and purposes as long as you're only dealing with signatory states, copyright is as international as laws can be without the UN literally being able to come in and put you in UN jail (which isn't really a thing either).
I don’t really see how that is true. Censorship means getting your own citizens in trouble so that doesn’t really work out and you only need turn on the news to see how the U.S. can poorly protect their citizens.
The Chinese gov’t is a mafia. Let’s not pretend otherwise. It’s citizens are kick ass and intelligent, under the grip of the FBI or Chinese govt? The two evils are incomparable
I have a related concerns about customer protection, maybe someone knows about it and can tell me: the famous Chinese bike-sharing companies are now coming everywhere in US & Europe. How "dangerous" (at least privacy-wise) is it to use them (i.e. give them your contact and bank data)?
I signed up a couple of weeks ago to Mobike, and so far it's worked well. I've given them my credit card details, which should provide me with some protection. If I was really paranoid I'd use a prepaid card like my Monzo card.
At some point I'll look at what data it is sending out, and how often. Many people have Chinese apps on their phones as many utilities in the Play store originate there. If you watch where they're communicating to you can see that it is Beijing. Just as most apps talk to various servers in the US.
Or you end up competing with something booted up by someone powerful's kid. Operating in these systems is a totally different skill set from competing in international markets.
Yes, I forgot to mention that. If you're a foreign company and bringing some damaging competition to a Chinese local owned company, you better get ready for some trouble
this is definitely a valid concern. decoupling automation from your cloud provider, moving it a layer up the stack, and leveraging only IaaS, can actually be quite helpful in these scenarios. this is an area where having a multicloud strategy, or minimally the ability to move between clouds at will, is essential.
example : your product displays news. Some of these might considered not acceptable by the Chinese govt and cause you to get shut down or blocked