> Its a bit ironic, China didn't want to be beholden to anyone and buggered off and built their own... meanwhile, the rest of the world whines - but doesn't seem to be interested in building anything similar for national infrastructure.

Maybe the alphabets, the culture, the political regime and the available funds make it possibly successful for China.

Most of the time, the “there can be only one” rule seems to apply. We may live to see the day where the giant US proprietary networks morph into some kind of federated “national” networks, with different set of legal rules. Somehow reminiscent of email, dns, xmpp...

There doesn’t seem to be an easy fix or alternatives to Twitter or Facebook.

>>Most of the time, the “there can be only one” rule seems to apply.

I don't think thats an issue given we have FB, Twitter, Insta, Snapchat, Reddit, etc etc. I think even myspace is still around..

>>giant US proprietary networks morph into some kind of federated “national” networks, with different set of legal rules.

I just don't think US _companies_ should morph into 'national' anything.. If you feel freedom of opinion/speech is so important, and you're counting on private companies in foreign countries to provide it - you've failed your citizens. Germany has its own armed forces, because they consider that key to the peace and sovereignty of their nation. Wouldn't a similar approach to digital infrastructure be prudent?

> I just don't think US _companies_ should morph into 'national' anything..

My wording wasn’t clear sorry. I was imagining the whole system morphing, not the company being themselves morphed in public services.

Facebook could be the pRivately owned US social network and the hypothetical Francebook a public service, both exchanging in a federated fashion over some kind of agreed upon protocol.

yeah - that really would be challenging...the data streams would have to be checked for compliance with local law in both directions, in real time?

Of course, that's assuming they could ever agree on a protocol. :-P

Comparable to the efforts spent for the international stock and trade markets I guess. Standards, treaties, taxes, lots of quirks and paperwork.

Maybe because real political independence of European and similar countries is too small? This leads to military, technological, and ecnomicall dependence as well. Until recently, this dependence was not a big problem, but as situation in the US started to slowly deteriorate it started to show more and more drawbacks.

The other country in addition to China with a certain level of political independence is Russia and it's also quite sensitive about nurturing its national infrastructure. It got certain level of success here, though due to its economic capabilities and population size, it's far from China's level (e.g. they don't have viable YouTube and Twitter competitiors). The other country which could fit here is India, but I am not familiar enough with its national IT infrastructure.

I would have thought the smaller countries would have an easier time of it - they don't have to build as big. Sorta like how Scandinavia got high speed internet rolled out much faster then more populous countries.

Don't forget about network effects. Assuming we are talking about centralized solutions, value of social networks (and of similar services) rises super-linearly compared to its total number of users. So it's another factor why it's much easier for big countries to build their independent infrastructure compared to a smaller ones.

>>Don't forget about network effects.

Hyper-localized services are also popular - 'neighborhood' and local shopping, etc. I really don't see making services for say, 35ish million population like Canada, has being difficult compared to making services for 320ish million like the US has. There are a number of social media,etc. that get 50M MAUs, so its not a 'google scale' problem by any means.

edit: grammar

Social media platforms are powerful, not critical. If all the platforms disappeared tomorrow, our lives would not be disrupted (personally I think we’d be even healthier, but that’s a personal view). This doesn’t change the fact that these networks can reach and move the masses. I also don’t believe that these problems would be solved by creating alternative national platforms controlled by governments: why should users migrate from fb/twitter/...? Governments wouldn’t spend huge sums on engineering engagement and addiction (as they shouldn’t).