The sentiment that access to Google services doesn't matter because there are sufficient Chinese replacements is absolutely wrong. The Chinese government is handicapping its tech labor development by blocking Google.
I teach a basic web development workshop to university and vocational school students. One of the things we teach is how to look up things for youself on the internet. (Is that a cry of disbelief I hear? You can't imagine how confused I was before we specifically modeled and taught this.) Baidu search results, when it comes to searching for technical answers, are really lame. Google's search results are better, mostly because they tap heavily into the stackexchange network. It's disappointing and frustrating to try to encourage students to search for things via Baidu because the answers to their questions are so difficult to find. I've had students tell me that they turn on a VPN in order to access Google because those search results are that much better.
And it's not just a problem with having poor search results, but blocking the actual sites that have information is mind-boggling to me. I /know/ that China can do finer grain filtering than on a per-domain basis; I've seen specific articles blocked on wikipedia while wikipedia itself remained accessible.
Baidu's search results are basically unusable compared to Google's. The only reason it thrives is it's one of the only few options in the country. Another thing, given the ruling party's organization structure and its way of execution/management, a rough cut(I mean 一刀切 in Chinese) style is exactly what you can find in almost all the things they do. A fine-grained approach can hardly be expected in this case. Not to mention there is a lack of feedback mechanism of this demand for decision makers.
Ironically though, if there was to be no GFW in China, at least half of the web tech sector would disappear. Startups are in a weird place of suffering the most but also benefiting the most from the GFW.
i agree that as a software developer, google is an essential tool, it goes where sometimes stackoverflow doesn't go, but there are true alternatives that aren't local like yahoo, bing, duckduckgo, these are all foreign and work more or less uninhibited, it's just that these companies actually follow local protocol which google outright told the chinese government to fuck off.
If I were the chinese government, I would do what the US do: Declare loudly the importance of free speech, human rights etc. while infecting every server with trojans, using the cheap human resource to clickfarm positive wikipedia articles, use machine learning and neural network to recognize dissident patterns on the internet and target them specifically, spy on the population while condamning other countries for citizen surveillance, and most importantly, scream as loudly as you can about how crucial human right is while secretly spending $$$ on extraordinary rendition.
I teach a basic web development workshop to university and vocational school students. One of the things we teach is how to look up things for youself on the internet. (Is that a cry of disbelief I hear? You can't imagine how confused I was before we specifically modeled and taught this.) Baidu search results, when it comes to searching for technical answers, are really lame. Google's search results are better, mostly because they tap heavily into the stackexchange network. It's disappointing and frustrating to try to encourage students to search for things via Baidu because the answers to their questions are so difficult to find. I've had students tell me that they turn on a VPN in order to access Google because those search results are that much better.
And it's not just a problem with having poor search results, but blocking the actual sites that have information is mind-boggling to me. I /know/ that China can do finer grain filtering than on a per-domain basis; I've seen specific articles blocked on wikipedia while wikipedia itself remained accessible.