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Akamai to shut down its CDN operations in China

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Re: Akamai to shut down its CDN operations in China

#111

Post by seanmcdirmid »

tehjoker wrote: post #109
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya, I don’t see that lasting very long since China production is too cheap to compete with. They’ve basically taken over the whole illegal drug business here in the USA (opium has never been a very big drug in the states). I don’t really know what China is trying to prove though, is the PLA involved or is it just a few big Tianjin SOE pharmaceuticals?

It's not lasting it's over. The US pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021 and the Taliban vastly reduced poppy cultivation. That's what caused a sharp rise in heroin prices and a demand for a substitute. I haven't looked into fent, but given the information is coming mainly from US security agencies who consider china an enemy state, I need to see physical evidence. I won't accept their say-so. This narrative about China…

Great for them. And I guess you are going to tell me China’s fentanyl production and export to the west is in revenge for the opium war that happened in the 19th century?

This has been going on since 2019, fent took over long before the USA left Afghanistan and the Taliban retook control again over poppy production (they were effective at exporting before, so who knows what is going on right now). My guess is that that market doesn’t exist anymore and illicit drugs are controlled by cheap imports of fent from China.

Re: Akamai to shut down its CDN operations in China

#112

Post by tehjoker »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #111
tehjoker wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not lasting it's over. The US pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021 and the Taliban vastly reduced poppy cultivation. That's what caused a sharp rise in heroin prices and a demand for a substitute. I haven't looked into fent, but given the information is coming mainly from US security agencies who consider china an enemy state, I need to see physical evidence. I won't accept their say-so. This narrative about China…

Great for them. And I guess you are going to tell me China’s fentanyl production and export to the west is in revenge for the opium war that happened in the 19th century? This has been going on since 2019, fent took over long before the USA left Afghanistan and the Taliban retook control again over poppy production (they were effective at exporting before, so who knows what is going on right now). My guess is that th…

Unlikely. If the precursors are being produced in China, it's just capitalism at work. They don't need to do this kind of stuff, their economic growth is double ours. They just need to mind their house and the world will change in their favor.

> My guess is that that market doesn’t exist anymore and illicit drugs are controlled by cheap imports of fent from China.

That's an interesting take.

EDIT: I am reading some reporting on this.

It seems according to mainstream accounts, most fentanyl is allegedly produced in Mexico from Chinese precursors. It is further added that a significant or all of these precursors are difficult to interdict because they are used for making ordinary consumer items.

"Seizing the precursor chemicals that traffickers need is extremely difficult. Many are used to make basic goods, such as medicines, pesticides and soap."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/20...

So one interpretation could be (requiring a more thorough investigation of the precursors list) that China simply produces ordinary bulk chemicals used for many purposes and sends them to people that buy them.

Re: Akamai to shut down its CDN operations in China

#113

Post by sangnoir »

dgfitz wrote: post #99
sangnoir wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I'm glad that we can at least agree that the US has protectionist policies and has had them for a long time. If you want a bigger protected industry, perhaps checkout any Farm bill from the past several decades. But that's neither here nor there. China is not weird for having protectionist measures - like you said - it's pretty normal - the scope and size is what may be unusual for a country that's not a hegemo…

> Acknowledging that will help frame whether the respective countries have the political appetite to temp or undo those policies. What does framing matter? Things are going to happen, trying to “frame” them is why journalism is miserable.

What journalism? I'm talking about how we frame the discussion on HN in threads like this one.

Re: Akamai to shut down its CDN operations in China

#114

Post by wumeow »

Barrin92 wrote: post #97
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chinese companies don’t have to play by the rules in the same way that foreign companies do. China isn’t a rule of law country, and has explicitly stated that it doesn’t want to be a rule of law country. Instead laws are enforced selectively for whatever outcome the official branch wants at the moment (rule by law). They are perfectly willing to fine American companies when Chinese companies cheat (and not apply anyw…

>and not apply anywhere near the same enforcement to the Chinese company About two years ago China imposed regulations on its own tech sector so strict that it killed the entire "ed-tech" sector overnight and wiped out a decent chunk of the country's tech market value. What other country has done this to its own companies? The US has slapped a 100% tariff on cars, bans on Chinese hardware and software in autonomous v…

> About two years ago China imposed regulations on its own tech sector so strict that it killed the entire "ed-tech" sector overnight and wiped out a decent chunk of the country's tech market value

Unless you can point to a foreign company that was treated less harshly under these regulations than a Chinese one, this doesn’t disprove the parent’s point.

> The US has slapped a 100% tariff on cars, bans on Chinese hardware and software in autonomous vehicles, ripping out 5G equipment, tried to basically destroy Huawei specifically, and the list goes on.

Besides the car tariffs, these measures were taken to prevent Chinese hacking and intelligence gathering, not to protect domestic industries.

Re: Akamai to shut down its CDN operations in China

#115

Post by n144q »

mihaaly wrote: post #81
wafflerewire wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My enterprise sized day job is an Akamai customer. Nothing in China directly so we won't be directly impacted. As a hypothetical, if we got told that we had to switch providers to stay in a region, we'd need to rebuild pipelines, EdgeWorkers, edge caching rules, origin routing configurations and probably more I'm not aware of. Plus testing all of those changes in a non-breaking way across the entire enterprise. Along…

Sounds fragile and pretty exposed. (Also a complete layman here)

No, quite the opposite. Big companies likely also have other big(ger) companies as partners/customers, all of which want stableness and see things keep working. Therefore companies need careful planning, execution and testing to ensure there is minimal disruption.

Startups and a certain company can move fast and break things. But not everyone can do this.

Re: Akamai to shut down its CDN operations in China

#116

Post by tokioyoyo »

mayama wrote: post #110
tokioyoyo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well depends on the organizations. Some of the organizations aren't actually pulling away from China, as they're just getting outcompeted in terms of price/quality by local companies. To my understanding, government is trying to convince people that "Chinese products can also be luxury", and some people are switching.

Or it could be part of general trend of splitting off internet and creating a firewalled chinese internet. PRC is explicitly favoring this outcome for decades now with explicit incentives via legal, financial and social routes.

They already did that ages ago. Any web tech company that wants access to Chinese market needs to play ball with PRC (just like what Apple and Microsoft does). Average Chinese person really doesn't care about global web, and the ones that really do, figure a way out through VPNs. I'm not Chinese, so I might be totally wrong, but that is my perception of talking to expats or people who still in the country.

Re: Akamai to shut down its CDN operations in China

#117

Post by Jcampuzano2 »

xyst wrote: post #87
animitronix wrote: post #73

Good, no US company should have ever been doing business in China

Does this also mean exploiting their cheap/slave labor for manufacturing and importing materials is also off the table? Very naive to think the incoming US administration would do anything to help the middle class. He sold voters as “America first”, yet his actions speak for the billionaire class.

In an ideal world the answer to your question is yes, we should not be exploiting slave wages/labor. But most of us are simply not in the position to make that decision.

And the webs of manufacturing middlemen make it difficult to even know at what point in the chain would this practice be happening.

Not to mention the average person would see nothing more than prices going up and complain with 0 knowledge of whats happening downstream

Re: Akamai to shut down its CDN operations in China

#118

Post by dogma1138 »

eh_why_not wrote: post #26

> All current China CDN customers must complete the transition to our Partners’ solution by June 30, 2026... Can anyone here who works in the field shed some light on why it takes a whole 1.5 years for such a change to take effect? What's involved in a CDN transition that can't be done in, say, 6 months?

It’s the difference between all hands on deck for 6 months and a reasonable pace over 18 months.

If you are just running a single website with DNS fronting that’s not an issue.

But large customers tend to have more advanced connectivity on L3/4 and asymmetric routing.

Then there is the CDN part itself are you only using the basic auto caching? That’s not a problem but if you manually manage it then all that needs to be converted as well and there is no guarantee that the partner API would be compatible or even have the same functionality as your current CDN.

Re: Akamai to shut down its CDN operations in China

#119

Post by ghaff »

mayama wrote: post #110
tokioyoyo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well depends on the organizations. Some of the organizations aren't actually pulling away from China, as they're just getting outcompeted in terms of price/quality by local companies. To my understanding, government is trying to convince people that "Chinese products can also be luxury", and some people are switching.

Or it could be part of general trend of splitting off internet and creating a firewalled chinese internet. PRC is explicitly favoring this outcome for decades now with explicit incentives via legal, financial and social routes.

Organizations dealt with certain "weirdnesses" (the great Firewall) for a long time. But my sense is that over the past few years there's been an increasing sense of pulling back from all this.
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