Why Is Dropbox Back On the Chinese Market? 46
Nerval's Lobster writes "Dropbox has renewed access to the Chinese market for the first time in four years. But why? The Chinese government first blocked access to Dropbox in 2010, most likely to prevent people within China from sharing data via the cloud. Now Dropbox is back online in China, albeit at slower speeds. Despite repeated queries from Slashdot, however, Dropbox has declined to comment on why China may have dropped the in-country restrictions to its services. "We still have nothing to share," the company responded after the third email. Dropbox isn't the only foreign cloud service available on the Chinese market (although Google Drive remains blocked): in late 2013, Amazon announced it would open an Amazon Web Services (AWS) region in the country; at the time, the Amazon Web Services Blog alluded to the "legal and regulatory requirements" that this new AWS region will obey. So questions remain: Did Dropbox know it would regain entry to the Chinese market? If so, did it need to agree to certain conditions before the Chinese government would "flip the switch," as it were?"
This isn't anything out of the ordinary... (Score:0, Interesting)
Of course dbox had to agree to certain conditions to gain access to the Chinese market. That's how it works, you want to do business within a country, you abide by their rules or you go packing, it's just more "questionable" by Western standards when it comes to China, in that being Eastern in nature and not entirely capitalist, its way of doing things is different than what is the Western norm -- that and China has the economic cloud (on pace to surpass the US and EU economically within the next 5 years if current trends hold up, growing at over a trillion USD per year) to impose its way of doing things.
There's probably some censorship involved as well, which frankly is fine and dandy, the West shuts out any mention of Tibetan terror attacks or ethnic violence against the Han and Hoi people of Lhasa, why should China not shut out Western propaganda about happy, shiny, peaceful Tibetans that don't really exist? Same for the Uighur-related censorship, except you don't hear much about them non-Chinese media because the West is riding the anti-Muslim wave.
Re:They likely give the Chinese govt full access (Score:5, Interesting)
The timing is suspicious, given the mail they just sent out to all their users updating the TOS with an additional "Government Data Request Principles" section.