Battle for the Internet

Re:Battle for the Internet by kbart on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @08:50AM (#14752034)

It's not an isolation as Americans are free to chose to use Alipay, WeChat or whatever any other service available on open net, as opposed to China where you can't use Google, Facebook and many other services even if you'd like to, unless you cheat GFW by using VPN. Most people outside of China don't use Alipay/WeChat just because there are many local payment providers that are easier to deal legally in case something goes wrong.

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Re:Battle for the Internet by dis-sys on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @09:03AM (#14752120)

then you tell me how Alipay is a national security threat to the US according to US lawmakers.

https://www.ft.com/content/193bbffc-38af-11e7-821a-6027b8a20...

please don't bother mentioning the minority stake from CIIC, if that is a national security threat to the US, then all successful Chinese firms have the same issue.

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Re:Battle for the Internet by JohnTHaller on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @10:19AM (#14752686)

As stated above, anything hosted within mainland China can be weaponized by the great firewall of China and used for DDoS and other malware attacks like China did against github.

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Re:Battle for the Internet by dis-sys on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @11:49AM (#14753519)

You forgot to mention the wannacry attack with the tool that can be traced back to NSA.

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Re:Battle for the Internet by JohnTHaller on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @12:14PM (#14753756)

I don't recall the NSA attempting to weaponize my personal PC when I browsed a website using malware javascript served via a commercial analytics network to attack an open source project the way the Chinese government did. Comparing that to a tool developed by a random nefarious actor using an exploit the NSA had on file is just the tiniest bit of a stretch.

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Re:Battle for the Internet by kbart on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @09:18AM (#14752217)

I'm not familiar enough with this situation as I'm not American myself and can't open your link (it's paywalled), but I'm sure Americans are still free to use Alipay despite lawmakers like it or not. That's the key difference from China, where you can't even access facts the ruling party doesn't like [0].

0. https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-06-03/how-china-has-censore...

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Re:Battle for the Internet by soundwave106 on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @11:05AM (#14753130)

That article is paywalled, but finding another article, it looks like the concern is specifically on Alipay taking over Moneygram? (http://www.pymnts.com/news/regulation/2017/u-s-lawmakers-war...) Further Googling says that some of the concern is that Moneygram is in heavy use in military bases (http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/447669/moneygram-ant-fi...).

(It is worth noting that these remarks came in the middle of a bidding war between Ant and Euronet (https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/14/euronet-alibaba-ant-financ...). Take the situation however you want...)

Either way, other articles (https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/9/15595338/alipay-us-expansi...) point out that Alipay has a presence in the United States... the concern seemed pretty specific, and not really like the wholesale blocking of major American (and other) sites that China engages in.

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Re:Battle for the Internet by dis-sys on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @11:56AM (#14753584)

Using that logic, Chinese should cite national security concerns and ban Intel processor, Apple devices or simply anything comes with a US made/designed chip from all those so called "sensitive" government departments. Oh, let's don't forget US made airplanes, still remember the spy bugs placed on the airplane suppose to be used by the former Chinese president? Sounds like a national security threat to me.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...

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