China Telecom Companies Pledge To Stop Monopolistic Practices 68
hackingbear writes "China's two telecommunications giants, China Telecom and China Unicom, announced Friday they will substantially raise their broadband speeds while further lowering broadband costs by 35% over the next five years. They also acknowledge the existence of monopolistic practices in reply to a recently launched investigation, which is the first of its kind against major Chinese state-owned enterprises. Being state-owned companies, their profits supposedly belong to the nation, but they have also become 'golden rice bowls' for their management and employees, and their supervising departments and officials." If the Chinese government would like to investigate these companies' monopolistic behavior, I have a suggestion on where to start looking.
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That's not to say that American ladies have the right idea, it does nothing but hurt their case when they decide to avoid developing personalities to concentrate on being snotty and pretty
The funny thing is the flip side. There is nothing more bitter than a middle-aged woman whose beauty faded long ago, meanwhile the sexual attractiveness of men her age increases since they now make more money and have more sophistication than when they were younger.
The other hilarious thing? Look at those women who are snotty and pretty (but only physically). See the kind of guys they're with? They're assholes. They frequently mistreat them. Maybe they cheat on them. Their shallow nature and total
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Re:In other news (Score:5, Interesting)
Golden rice bowl is (you probably could have guessed this) a Chinese idiom meaning a high paying, stable job. Besides, it's not a stereotype, almost all meals in China (and other Asian countries as well) have a rice component. The word for meal is the same as rice.
http://www.targetchinese.com/targetpedia/a-stable-high-paying-job/ [targetchinese.com]
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I admit I startled a bit when I saw "golden rice bowl" but I figured it was probably a translated idiom. It's like when somebody refers to their average job as their "bread and butter".
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In the south, yes. Most meals in the north of China are wheat based. Rice isn't uncommon in the north, but wheat noodles, wheat dumplings, pancakes, and bread are the bases for a lot of meals.
But rice is still used in a lot of expressions.
Re:In other news (Score:4, Informative)
but they have also become 'golden rice bowls'
Anyone else find that racist? It is equivalent to a story about black people calling it "golden fried chicken bucket". It's a lame stereotype. Can we not have these in the front page please?
The "Iron Rice Bowl" is actually an actual Chinese expression generally used to refer to a career in the Government service / Civil service. So it's not exactly racist. It's similar to the "Golden Parachutes" that they use to refer to Western severance packages.
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The iron rice bowl means their source of food cannot be broken easily. Think of it as employment for life.
Golden rice bowl is probably the "1%" version of that.
We Americans can show the Chinese Telcos (Score:5, Funny)
We can show you how to have a duopoly instead!
Re:We Americans can show the Chinese Telcos (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:We Americans can show the Chinese Telcos (Score:5, Interesting)
There is absolutely no assurance that they would actually be thus motivated, and, in practice, you'd probably see roughly the same level of monopolistic behavior and general rent-seeking obstructionism from a state-owned corporation as you would from an ostensibly-private 'regulated monopoly', like old-school Ma Bell; but there isn't any theoretical problem preventing it from happening...
Pitting individuals, departments, project development teams, etc. against each other in order to induce greater effort is hardly unknown among organizations that 'own' both sides of the competition they set up. Sometimes it's a good idea, sometimes it is a terrible idea; but it is empirically undeniable that (if they think that the benefits of internal competition will be greater than the waste of internal duplication of effort) people will sometimes pit their assets against one another.
After all, if it were necessary that state-owned telcos be a monopoly, why would there be more than one?
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As opposed to the free market capitalist utopia Amerika?
Land of the "American Dream"?
Land where the 20% of the population who's future was sold as collateral protests the 1% who bought it?
Land where the remaining 79% tells that 20% to get back to making collateral so they can finish what they started?
Face it, central management or otherwise: the golden rule is "those who have the gold make the rules", and "equality" is a lie used to convince everyone but the billionaires they got as much as they deserved an
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I believe that was cavreader's point. China has the same problems as America, the difference is that in China, the corporations ARE the government where as in the US, the corporations have to keep buying the government and it is at least theoretically possible to change that equation. There are enough of a vocal idiot minority in the Occupy movement that think socialism is a good idea and don't see it is just making the current problem permanent instead of fixing it.
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It's the same as other countries that tout the democratic free speech thing but do their very best to minimize democratic effects and free speech so that those in power stay in power.
For the record, I think any attempt of Marxism we have seen has started with violating it's biggest cornerstones: everyone equal, including those in 'power', and no personal ownership of stuff.
Calling it by a different name with communism helps me more easily explain the difference to the ignorant who can only accept capitalism
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Re:We Americans can show the Chinese Telcos (Score:4, Informative)
The organization I work for has links from both companies. We'd love to have access to other ISPs, but they don't exist. You do the math.
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You're splitting hairs. "Being" a monopoly is not illegal but acting like one is.
But you're wrong. A company does not have to act like a monopoly to be prosecuted by the US Justice Department under the anti-trust laws. They're civil prosecutions, not criminal, but prosecutions nonetheless.
Re:We Americans can show the Chinese Telcos (Score:5, Insightful)
How can a communist government's state owned corporation have anything but a monopoly?
It's easy. A five-star general runs a corporation, a government minister runs a corporation, and a party chief also runs a corporation. Each interest wants their own cut of the industry in the state.
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Boycott att. Now that the iphone doesn't force the necessary evil fire iphone fans, lets see a boycott!
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The difference is... (Score:1)
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The correct translation is that they promised that they would "not come in your mouth".
See, Chinese is a very difficult language, and there is always a subtext.
Can't you guys please stop all your racist rants on /. ??
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"Racist"? Are you insane?
You must be one of those hot-headed Swedes.
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I'm serious. Can you really not see that my comment was not the least bit racist, but anti-corporate? Anti-monopolistic? Or do you see the word "Chinese" and just assume racism? it wasn't the "Chinese" part that was being knocked but that a telco would "promise" to not be monopolistic.
Come on, you've been around a while apparently. I have to assume some level of reading comprehension.
Chinese is actually a very difficult language for Westerners and
Pedant point (Score:5, Insightful)
They are lowering their broadband costs by 35%, but what about their prices?
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They are lowering their broadband costs by 35%, but what about their prices?
Easily achieved by pulling 35% of the cables out of the wall every week. As a boon, all that cable pulling creates jobs!
We could also re-connect the ones we pulled out the previous week, but while this creates jobs it also raises costs in the long run.
Long live the great firewall!
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"China Unicom" is an awesome name (Score:5, Funny)
in fonts where m looks like rn.
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I just now realised that it was a m, and I did indeed think that China Unicorn was an awesome name.
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Here is different (Score:1)
Deja vu... (Score:2)
This is a joke (Score:2)
At this time, it is in the west's best interest for us to kill that idea as well as start raising trade barriers unless they will start honoring their treaty obligations.
Hopefully, O will not be as stupid or greedy as W/neo-cons were.
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I'm glad to read, in the face of a 2+ trillion dollar trade deficit, that someone here agrees we need protective tariffs! Every economy that its still solvent has them.
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I don't know if you are being sarcastic or not but the USA does have protective tariffs already. It was amusing to see the free trade agreement come in between Australia and the USA where the USA wanted tariffs to be removed off their exports but no mention was made regarding the USA tariffs on lamb, wheat and steel...
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http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5700.html [census.gov]
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As a Canadian I would like to note that it is also not unheard of for the US to illegally raise tariffs on goods that are already under a free trade agreement.
Personally, I'm not against tariffs. They are an effective way to deal strategically with important policy. In Japan, for instance, there are tariffs on food imports that are intended to deal with food security and ensure that an agricultural industry can exist on a series of islands full of volcanoes. It is arguably much more cost effective to imp
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Hey Man, You Just Slashdotted The People's Daily (Score:2)
There's just gotta be something wrong with that picture.
What next? "'The Cool, Fresh Taste of Marlboro Cigarrettes is the Opiate of the People' -- Karl Marx".
There's a lot more to this than meets the eye (Score:5, Interesting)
As an internet developer in China, I can tell you that the duopoly posed by these two companies is wrecking havoc on the Chinese internet. First, a bit of history:
Around 2001, there was only one company controlling most of China's internet access, and that was China Telecom. Jiang Mianheng, the eldest son of the Chinese President at the time, Jiang Zemin, took in hundred of millions in investment to start a new telecommunications company, China Netcom. They struggled for a while trying to compete, but China Telecom's dominance prevented them from getting much headway in the market. Jiang Zemin then used his massive leverage to break up China Telecom, and give 1/3 of its business, all in northern China, to China Netcom. This caused serious enmity between the two entities. Eventually China Netcom was purchased by China Unicom, the second largest mobile provider in China. So now you have China Telecom and China Unicom as the two major telecommunications entities in China.
Do to the bad blood between the two, the connectivity between the Unicom and Telecom backbones is utter shit. International lines are connected through Telecom's backbone through Shanghai and other hubs further south, so if you are on Unicom, expect international connections to be utter shit. I'm in Beijing, and most home and small business connections are on Unicom. 90% of the time international connectivity is slow or non-existent.
We have clients in Shanghai, which is mostly Telecom, our server is on Unicom here in Beijing, and they get dropped connections 1 out of every 5 or 6 requests. We had to set up a proxy in Shanghai to get around this. If you do a traceroute from a Unicom ADSL connection to a Telecom server, you can see response times jump to 300-400ms where the hand-off occurs.
It's fucking infuriating. You basically have to either build a convoluted topology and set up some serious monitoring, or pay exorbitant extortion fees and get on a BGP network to have solid nation-wide service for your customers. As a small start-up we are opting for the first for now.
Hopefully this government probe will also deal with these sorts of deeper issues as well, because these problems are seriously crippling the Chinese internet as a good place to do business.
LS
Malice or Stupidity? (Score:2, Interesting)
As a long term expat in china its nice to see some improvement in the Speed department. The internet here is besides being censored just slow here compared to...well somalia maybe. it also depends on location for example if your in BJ you can get (for $$$) lightningfast internet. But just outside the provincial border (hebei) its like 56k on good days and it does not matter how much you pay.
But i dont think its all greed. If there is the choice between malice and stupidity its usually the latter. China beca