When the Chinese were building their own mirror of the internet in the 2000s, I was really surprised. why spend time and money on something that already exists and works? ok, sure, all the technology is controlled by the US, they have a kill switch for any segment of the internet. but why bother? just use what’s there.
then in 2012 I was in Shanghai. I saw that they were living in a parallel reality. even back then there was WePay, in 2012 they were paying for almost everything through…a messenger bot or via QR. They sent each other money over Bluetooth right in front of me. they had their own cracked national Windows XP. Microsoft quietly sucked it up and even shared all the sources with them 😋 They had their own Chrome, with built-in Chinese services. They have independent payment systems, they don’t give a damn about Visa, Mastercard, SWIFT, schmift. The US won’t tell them “ we’ll cut you off from SWIFT”. Because they don’t give a fuck. They have their own cloud, they don’t give a shit if Netlify/Amazon/Cloudflare cut them off. They won’t even notice. If you enter the Chinese market, you have to store all your data with them. under their control. with full access to your infrastructure.
And we have nothing at all. Government websites run in Frankfurt, and God knows where Diia is even deployed. say tomorrow Google sanctions us (or the US, the wind blows the other way) - where will you download Diia from? Will we be like the Crimeans, pretending we live in Kherson so we can use Google services? And then you log in once without a VPN and get permabanned for life. Not to mention that literally all the software the whole state depends on isn’t ours.
But the Chinese figured this out 25 years ago. Everyone laughed at their firewall. We laugh at Cheburnet…
In my opinion, only truly independent and strong states will have their own little island, with their own messengers, AWS, cloud, Google Photos, OS, phones, Android. Sooner or later they’ll be forced to do it. Because the influence and the leverage that modern technologies and access to them give are extremely dangerous.
Today we’re friends with the US (although, as always, without any written guarantees, just words). Tomorrow we won’t agree on how to split our pipeline, if we get too cocky, it’ll be just like in the screenshot: oops, we’re shutting off AWS in 3 days, go download your dockers somewhere, oops sorry, the Docker repos are closed for you too…so what were you saying about the pipeline, aborigines? here’s a crook for president, go vote, it’s easier for us to do business with the underdeveloped.