Slashdot Mirror
Google Considers China's "Web Mapping License"
eldavojohn writes "Back in May, China rolled out new laws requiring online mapping services to be 'certified' by the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping. The laws appear to go into effect this month. Today an AFP article outlines Google's consideration of these rules and notes that it's unlikely Google will meet the qualifications to become certified as all of its servers holding the mapping data are outside of China. The AFP also reported that 'Foreign firms wanting to provide mapping and surveying services in China are required to set up joint ventures or partnerships with local firms.' Unless large changes are made, Google's services might get a lot more stunted as China regulates onward."
The AFP also reported that 'Foreign firms wanting to provide mapping and surveying services in China are required to set up joint ventures or partnerships with local firms.'
I omitted my commentary on this particular clause as it's pretty much just speculation but I would claim that the government is encouraging/requiring/enabling corporate espionage. Not to mention the probably very sensitive close up data Google may or may not have of areal images of the United States. Now, it might just be that the government wants to foster local businesses but I would argue that it has more to do with strategy and espionage. I know I'd be uncomfortable.
My work here is dung.
No surprise here. If doing business in China is about one thing, it's about greasing as many palms as possible. Don't forget to mention the bribes to be paid to local officials.
Doing business in China is almost as bad as doing business in Chicago or New Jersey... almost.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
China is CONSTANTLY accusing other nations of protectionism and yet are always pulling shit like this. I guess the lesson they are trying to communicate is that protectionism us bad, unless you are China, in which case it is good! I guess that is to be expected from them though, they constantly scold other governments on their fiscal policies yet refuse to open up their own books to public scrutiny.
Monstar L
This is designed to simply drain the IP from western companies into Chinese ones. This is on top of China having their money fixed against the dollar.Yes, they said that they would change it a bit, but inside of 2 days, they rolled back the change. Quit honestly, China is an a cold war with the west via economic means. At this time, the west needs to tell CHina to either obey their agreements (float their money, drop their trade barriers, quit dumping/subsidizing, follow through on their international agreements such as CLintons as well as IMF) OR simply impose a slowly increasing tariff on ALL GOODS coming from China. If the west, India, and Brazil will follow through on this, then China WILL obey their agreements.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Frankly I'm beginning not to care. There's enough Chinese that if they got the guts tomorrow they could wipe out the regime, including the PLA, in about fifteen minutes (there would probably be a few tens of million dead, but Mao killed more than that with his incredibly retarded economic policies during the 1950s). People too cowardly to tear every Communist Party member's head off deserve the kind of rule the Party gives them.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
This is not even a very well veiled attempt to get any company that wants to do business in China to open up all of their source code and "hand the keys to the kingdom" to the Chinese government.
Ironically I bet there are companies that carry a big IP hammer to beat up the rest of the world with will be beating down the doors to become slavering lapdogs of China for a chance at the profits pie. Of course China will say "you companies just do not understand China so we need to repackage everything you do to fit our "culture"". What they are really meaning is that "Give us all of the stuff and we will let you play in our sandbox... until we can reverse engineer your application or system and stick a "Made in China" label on it. The we will give you the boot or make the conditions so impossible for you to do business you will run out with your tails between your legs".
Tisha Hayes
You do realise that after the opium wars and colonisation period, they're far more pissed at the West and Japan then at their own leaders?
We've been doing this PR crap here in the West for centuries now. It really isn't hard to deflect the rage of the mob towards the outside enemy. And as your argument goes, there's enough Chinese to wipe US and most of EU regimes.
This law has big implications for open mapping projects like Open Street Map. Have a look at the warning on the China page for OSM:
This [law] to outlaw the entire OSM project, and any participation or contribution. ... People visiting China would be well advised to avoid overtly wandering around looking at GPS units, and avoid carrying OSM related documents in your luggage. Or you might prefer to abide by these strange Chinese laws, and just not do any mapping there at all.
People too cowardly to tear every Communist Party member's head off deserve the kind of rule the Party gives them.
What a brutish approach to politics."So a few million die" - so why haven't you resorted to violence against anything your government does that you don't like? I'm sure you could drum up enough of a local militia to send a message. I mean you clearly don't fear death or arrest or abuse.
When the strong oppress the weak, saying the weak deserve it because they are weak makes you sound like the biggest bigot ever and is incredibly short-sighted. That's the kind of attitude that promotes slavery and abuse of women. If you don't want to be grouped with those people, you better find a way to defend that claim or retract it.
Not exactly surprising, but not for corporate espionage.
Don't know if you noticed, but maps are militarily significant. If you have people providing maps of your country, using the gps on phones within your country to improve the quality of the maps, locate places, it's in your interest to have influence over them, particularly if your biggest competitor owns the satellites and the services run from within their borders.
I mean come on, the howls of outrage and surprise are laughably naive.
Deleted
Once their money comes back into balance with the dollar, they will collapse
Once their money comes back into balance with the dollar, you'll find the US economy will collapse as a major amount of the US national debt is held by the Chinese. It started off as a cheap way to fund American consumerism without having to worry - after all, China buys your bonds and you spend the cash they just gave you on Chinese goods - wins all round!
But.. that means they hold an enormous amount on US debt. If they decided to sell it on, both Yuan and the dollar would take an almighty hit - enough to pretty much collapse the US economy. Fortunately the Yuan is pegged to the dollar and doesn't float about - which could cause a bit of a collapse in either currency depending on which way it moved,
See, if the Yuan devalued against the dollar, they'd stop buying US debt. And so the cost of selling that debt would increase - the US needs to keep selling debt partly to fund the previous debt repayments - if the interest payments went up... you can see that wouldn't be good for the US. Considering how huge the debt is, that wouldn't be good at all.
Also, if the dollar didn't buy as much yuan as before, that would mean inflation for the US - no more cheap goods to buy.
So really, the US needs China to keep the dollar high. If they stop, you, them, and almost everybody is screwed. (Ok, maybe the Eurozone would come out of it better - assuming it doesn't collapse itself)
It's about control. They aren't trying to "find out" how Google does google maps, they are trying to create an in-country choke point. This choke point will choke the money from leaving the country _and_ choke the information reaching the citizens.
Imagine if you were the Bureau of Stuff of Some Country, and you could take 50% of the profit on every enterprise taking place on the internet in Some Country. Imagine that you can do it by letting random enterprises do random things, and then only attach yourself once a random thing had proven profitable. This is the money half of the equation.
Now imagine you are the Bureau of No of Some Country, and you could interpose yourself at the source of each new flow of information instead of needing a "wall" to selectively keep a flood of random Yes from entering your country. You could pre-impose your No well before it became a possibility.
The control item is particularly important here because you cannot _firewall_ Google maps selectively.
Say you are a Chinese dude, and you know that "something prohibited" is right north of something else. you can get that map of something prohibited by searching for that something else and then scrolling around. If china can require the information be brokered locally, the "Mass Government Grave" won't be blacked out or filtered, it will be listed as "Xue's Farm" or "Rocky Hillside Funtime Panda Reserve". Likewise for the "Comrades of the Party Beer Volcano and Free Hooker Forest".
The problem with censoring maps by exclusion is that even the holes provide information. If you cannot control and _edit_ a map at the source, you cannot _believably_ obscure what you want obscured.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
All comments so far are about economic/IP aspects. What about the political/cultural aspect of mapping? China could use this policy to enforce its preferred representation of the Tibet area. Like: replace all traditional Tibet names with new Chinese ones.
As an amateur photographer who happens to carry an AMOD GPS logging device with me everywhere I go (to geotag my photos), I'm thinking that maybe China wouldn't be the brightest idea for me visit-wise. (I guess in a way it's a good thing I probably can't afford such a trip anytime soon)
Basically, I'm guessing that if the Chinese government is that concerned about folks mapping things, they're probably going to take a very dim view of geotagged photos as well. I guess (if I screw up my world-view enough) I could sort of see why a totalitarian government could be very concerned about the "dangers" of such information. After all, if I have a photo showing some seriously poor village on the edge of survival, but tag it as being somewhere that the official propaganda says is an economic dynamo, it kind of exposes the lie. It's far easier to just step on my neck with their jack boots.
On the other hand, I would point out that gps loggers these days are very small and compact and don't actually require you to be walking around with big, obvious "HEY I'M IN UR BASE RECORDING UR COORDINATES" equipment... It seems to me that unless you tightly control where a tourist can go and what they can see (which I assume China does to some extent), the information WILL get out.
Truthfully, there isn't that much of a real national security issue anyway... Satellite imagery for ever square foot of the Earth is available... maybe not to super-high resolution in every corner yet, but it's getting there. An invading army doesn't need to know the name of the street to bomb it. This is purly "national security" from the viewpoint of a very paranoid totalitarian regime.
The Digital Sorceress