Business as usual. The real question is why the West sits on its hands.
What kind of response would you like to see from the West?
Block Chinese companies from doing certain things, require licenses etc.
China Blocks Foreign Companies from Mapping Its Roads for Self-Driving Cars
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Re: China Blocks Foreign Companies from Mapping Its Roads for Self-Driving Cars
#42Is there any international law or treaty explicitly requiring countries to allow their roads to be mapped by foreign countries/companies?
No. But the agreements of the WTO support the equal treatment for every company anywhere. The Chinese government only permits its own Chinese companies to profit, while block basically all foreign ones.
Re: China Blocks Foreign Companies from Mapping Its Roads for Self-Driving Cars
#43The leading position of China in AI and Quatum technology is very worrying. We must adapt.
AI: https://www.ft.com/content/856753d6-8d31-11e7-a352-e46f43c58...
Quantum tech: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/security/china-s...
Re: China Blocks Foreign Companies from Mapping Its Roads for Self-Driving Cars
#44They are not wrong, in that detailed maps of streets can reveal more than simply how to drive around. The combination of both detailed maps and vehicle flow is even more telling in terms of economics and other activities.
It will be interesting to watch the ramifications of this sort of policy. As China moves to become a leading economy with a high level of technology distributed throughout the country, it will become harder to control communications and information dispersal. Historically information access has been anathema to their style of governing and I can't see how they can have both.
Re: China Blocks Foreign Companies from Mapping Its Roads for Self-Driving Cars
#45This is the sore spot economists often have with anti-trade politics. Recap: people tend to only think of the benefits of trade in the money they make from trade, and not the products or ideas that they get when other countries make money from us. There are benefits to both buying from and selling to other countries, and by only considering one side, we make decisions that make us poorer. China doesn't want foreign c…
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Re: China Blocks Foreign Companies from Mapping Its Roads for Self-Driving Cars
#46This is the sore spot economists often have with anti-trade politics. Recap: people tend to only think of the benefits of trade in the money they make from trade, and not the products or ideas that they get when other countries make money from us. There are benefits to both buying from and selling to other countries, and by only considering one side, we make decisions that make us poorer. China doesn't want foreign c…
> but one billion people have drastically worse maps.
This is something that the Chinese government demonstrably does not care about.
They even mandate that an obfuscated coordinate system be used by GPS units and maps in China.
Re: China Blocks Foreign Companies from Mapping Its Roads for Self-Driving Cars
#47Ugh, I really wish everyone contributed to OpenStreetMap and shared its dataset. I don't want map accuracy to be a competitive advantage.
Re: China Blocks Foreign Companies from Mapping Its Roads for Self-Driving Cars
#48Protectionism with Chinese Characteristics It's a pretty common tactic. Cite "national security" or any other vaguely plausible reason to deny access to non-favored firms (foreign companies, and local companies who don't have the "connections"). If anyone complains, government spokesperson and 50 cent mafia generate lots of angry nationalistic crying. If another country retaliates, same spokesperson and 50 cent mafia…
US and EU have in the past blocked several Chinese companies (ZTE, Huawei, etc) for national security reasons as well. Would you classify them as protectionism? If yes, then why are you complaining? If not, then why are you applying double standards here?
Why not judge the concerns on their own merit?
Blocking a chip or other technology that's hard to vet is one thing.
Blocking mapping when the same is already accessible from space via spy and public satellites? Does not really makes sense.
Now, of course these cases can and should be compared, but so far it seems that citing national security issues in one case seems to be pretty baseless excuse, whereas in the other case it seems to have some merit, even if the actual ban of Chinese sourced components is ridiculous, because a lot of other things are sourced/imported from China with the same or more severe espionage potential.
Re: China Blocks Foreign Companies from Mapping Its Roads for Self-Driving Cars
#49Is there any international law or treaty explicitly requiring countries to allow their roads to be mapped by foreign countries/companies?
Common sense, perhaps?
Large militaries will create their own up-to-date maps for every region of the world where they could possibly expect to be operating. They will, of course, keep strategic details in such maps secret, but with a bit of marginal effort, the maps deemed to have low military relevance can also be sold to civilians for their business purposes.
In order to keep a location secret now, it can't be visible from space. And it can't have surface roads leading to it, or even change the surface significantly from historic aerial photographs of the same location. And it definitely can't have radio signals coming out of it. That basically means tunnels and submarines.
There exist people whose jobs are to stare at satellite images all day, classify them, and draw shapes into a database. There is no longer any credible military rationale for restricting by law the creation of surface maps.
Re: China Blocks Foreign Companies from Mapping Its Roads for Self-Driving Cars
#50It's a big surprise to me for a while that China Government blocks so many U.S. internet services but no complaints from the U.S. government what only complaints on old-type of unfair trading: steel, consumer goods, solar panels etc. The digital economy is much a bigger deal.
> The digital economy is much a bigger deal.
Is it really? Or would it all be compressible if someone else had complete control over your manufacturing and hardware supply chain?
Strategically I think China having a bigger Amazon competitor than anyone else pales in its relevance to the US compared to US infrastructure relying on Chinese-produced components.