I am Chinese. In practice blocking Twitter and Youtube protects Chinese companies like SinaWeibo and Youku from competing with their American rivals. The point is that China is a market big enough to play the game on its own courtyard.

I'm from China and I just don't know how to refute your last line. Google has been blocked for about half a month now, but average people would not feel a thing about it.

That's just sad.

I think that is because China has such a home grown ecosystem for google/twitter etc. alternatives

Russia? Not so much I think.

Yandex is the 4th largest search engine in the world and #1 in Russia. I'm pretty sure they have a large local social network as well but the name has slipped my mind.

VKontakte?

But that's not on account of brainwashing, that's could be on account of having no need for it. I've lived in China for 5 years and have survived without Google fine. Could also be that most young/modern Chinese have an apathetic split-mind: don't give a shit about Google and don't give a shit about who is blocking them from it or why. They aren't uninformed, they just don't care.

The last line about China seems extremely unnecessary and inaccurate.

>Only in China do you have a population so brainwashed that they think these things are being done for their benefit. Russians have an active dissent. Feed it; It will bear fruit.

Well, and only in America they believe such naive things.

For one, Russian people voted predominantly for Putin. The "dissent" you mention is mostly the US promoting some of his political rivals, feeding them (you nailed that one) and over-playing them for western audiences, so as to make a big fuss out of nothing to try to influence Russian policy for its own purposes. That's 90% of the "active dissent".

And China is a world player. They want (and deserve) their own Google or Twitter, not to be tied to externally controlled services. (Of course people whose own country is doing the controlling will disagree). Those kind of actions enable local players to sweep the market (why send control of internet search and ads to Mountain View?).

For the record, I've yet to see any North Koreans respond to my comment... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7886916