China In the Habit of Copying and Redirecting US Sites?

Want to know why US web companies have trouble making it in China? gaz_hayes passed us a link to the blog commiepod, which suggests that successful US websites are targeted by 'Chinese government backed companies.' "These companies copy the site, deploy it on a .cn domain, and then DNS poison or forcefully lower the bandwidth the US site. Just a few weeks ago google.com and google.cn were DNS poisoned across the entire Chinese internet and were being redirected to their Chinese competitor Baidu. This probably explains Google's 3rd quarter market share in China." This is a fairly serious accusation; anyone else have first-hand experiences that would back this up?

Comments

quite.

[apodyopsis]

No surprise.

I used to work in China quite alot and found the only way I could get decent Internet access and get things done was to VPN back to the UK office and then surf from their gateway - the slight delay was quite alot better then the local service.

I got used to shitty performance, websites suddenly dying for no reason, 30 second delays on some sites and others almost instant.

As with most things Chinese, we may see this at dodgy behavior - to them it is a normal business practice. As I once stated on a thread about Chinese knockoffs the problem is not to "stop them doing it" but is rather "to make them understand they are doing something wrong in the first place".

Some real info

[Conspire]

OK, I see a lot of posts here with some misleading info. Just to clear the air:

1. Foreign companies can own 100% of China enterprises (in some industries), and this is called a WOFE (Wholly Owned Foreign Enterprise)

2. For any company to operate a web site in China, they need an ICP (Internet Content Provider) license.

3. Only domestic PRC entities (citizens), can get an ICP license (any foreign ownership and ICP license cannot be issued)

4. There are ways around #2+#3, through a legal loophole which is quite simply, a) the foreign company has their in country manager or other domestic person setup a 100% domestic owned PRC company to get the ICP license. b) the foreign company has a proxy agreement and share pledge with the "official" shareholder(s) of that PRC domestic company which are side contracts giving control and management of the domestic company to the foreign owned (WOFE) of the foreign investors. c) The WOFE also has a contract with the PRC company to extract all revenue out through a "technical services and management agreements". d) The WOFE then is able to book all the revenue from the company, making it a synthetic subsidiary and thus getting around all the laws forbidding foreign investment in the PRC company. (interesting note, this structure was designed in the 70's to get around foreign investment limitations in petrochemical industries, and is now used by all the major internet and game companies listed abroad, ie: tom.com, sina.com, snda.com, Google, Yahoo etc.)

5. The telcos here (China Netcom and China Telecom) often seem to re-direct traffic as the post claims. I have seen google.com traffic redirected for an entire weekend to 114.cn, which is China Telecom's lame search engine! Baidu.com redirect I see much less often. There are also many others for instance ALL traffic was redirecting to Yahoo.cn on my cable broadband connection from my house yesterday, no idea why Yahoo.cn, but it was.

6. A lot of traffic to the China internet portal kings is fake, by fake think how gold farming in MMOGs works, people playing for gold and getting paid 0.50 cents an hour to play in China. I have heard *rumors* from insider friends saying that many portals pay people the equivalent to click on links all day.....think market cap and ad revenue reporting.....it would not surprise me in the least but I can't say I have seen it personally.