More China-Only Standards
from the they're-everywhere dept
Okay, okay, we get it. China absolutely does not want to play in any sort of global technology standard. For a while, they wanted nothing to do with WiFi, claiming it was insecure, and tried to put together their own WAPI standard, which has been on-again, off-again multiple times. Then there's 3G broadband wireless. While the rest of the world seems to be going with EVDO or UMTS/HSDPA China keeps on insisting that it's going to have its very own 3G standard, TD-SCDMA, despite the fact that every time we're told it's ready to go, it turns out the technology doesn't work and it needs to be delayed again. The latest, comes from Sachin Garg, who writes "c10n.info: China's People's Daily tells us that China's Ministry of Information has approved their AVS video coding standard. This proprietary standard is an attempt to sidestep the increasingly large burden of royalties that China pays for MPEG patent licensing. Encouraged by their government, Chinese electronics firms are shunning technological protocols invented abroad and developing their own. This AVS codec is a part of China's own DVD format. "Commercial use of this technology is expected to start by the end of this month with mobile TV services offered by the country's major mobile operators"." Avoiding royalty payments is often the excuse given, though sometimes they like to talk about how existing standards just aren't secure enough. However, it seems like there's plenty of evidence suggesting a bigger reason may be the ability to build in backdoors to any of these technologies.
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Control
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Re: Control
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China-only internet?
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The Celtic Fiddler
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National Firewall
The PRC is on a steady track to have its own internet.
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No Subject Given
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blah
Time to cut China back off. Things were better before then were allowed into the G8.
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Xenophobia
giving them a competative edge as the innovators.
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Geo Politics at play
Regardless of whether or not specific wireless committies payed enough attention to China's needs in this case, there is a 50 year history of the PRC being snubbed in the International arena by Western powers, so now that China has the ecomonic clout (and third world political influence) to asert itself, it will. And if the established players won't let China dictate terms for once, China is happy to use it's state capitalist model to good effect and create a new Beta vs VHS style global market struggle to make a point.
Media and communications formats make a good vehicle for Chinese political manipulation because the Chinese consume "content" so voraciously.
Or, to put it another way: If China is going to be the number 1 producer and consumer of (for example) blank discs over the next 10 years, why should it have to pay Japan for the right to use them?
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