The Chinese government operates their Internet blocks (the “Great Firewall”). But overwhelmingly, it is the Chinese people who are trying to access information on the public Internet.
Blocking the entire country will do little to hurt the government (who can employ state resources to get whatever information they want) and do quite a bit more to harm the Chinese people by reducing whatever level of information independence they still have.
If there is going to be significant change in China, it will have to come from the Chinese people. Cutting them off from the Internet vindictively does not advance that goal.
There are specific people in China doing specific bad things with specific computing resources. It would be far better for the U.S. government to dedicate more resources to finding and partnering with orgs and projects (like icanhazip or Cloudflare) to find the info they need to apply targeted mitigations.
“China does it, so we should do it too” only makes sense as a strategy if our goal is to become exactly like China is today. I don’t think that should be our goal.
> “China does it, so we should do it too” only makes sense as a strategy if our goal is to become exactly like China is today. I don’t think that should be our goal.
I very strongly disagree. An eye for an eye is exactly what needs to be done and should have been done from the beginning. Unfortunately, it is too late. 1989 massacre should have been condemned more solidly and trade restrictions should have been placed in the 90's. The bet that western alliances made is that China would open up in the 2000s leading into 2010s. That has gone horribly wrong.
Blocking the entire country will do little to hurt the government (who can employ state resources to get whatever information they want) and do quite a bit more to harm the Chinese people by reducing whatever level of information independence they still have.
If there is going to be significant change in China, it will have to come from the Chinese people. Cutting them off from the Internet vindictively does not advance that goal.
There are specific people in China doing specific bad things with specific computing resources. It would be far better for the U.S. government to dedicate more resources to finding and partnering with orgs and projects (like icanhazip or Cloudflare) to find the info they need to apply targeted mitigations.
“China does it, so we should do it too” only makes sense as a strategy if our goal is to become exactly like China is today. I don’t think that should be our goal.