I don’t really want to find out empirically; but I’d be fascinated to know more about the competing incentives (and the shape and slope of various parties spines and supply curves) that control whether a set of regional restrictions is more likely to migrate outward or turn inward on itself.
The Chinese case certainly seems to be largely the latter, I suspect in no small part by design; with periodic attempts to press outward by leaning on entities with interests both in China and abroad(as in the delightful Yahoo dissident sellout case, or the push on airlines to be… suitably patriotic…in their labelling of Taiwan on in flight maps); and use of the privilege of entry as a means of extracting concessions (partnerships with local firms, self censorship, etc.)
For broader denizens of the internet, though, Chinese internet policy seems to have a rather surprisingly small scale given the sheer size of the Chinese internet and the volume of their internet-widget production. WeChat isn’t exactly taking the world by storm.
Since we have no examples on the same scale it makes one wonder how the EU giving into it’s most depraved impulses on copyright law would go: spread outward because the EU is far too much to give up and it’s easier to provide one censored version? Collapse inward into a system of mixed local hegemons and some cut down foreign offerings, with a fringe of VPN kiddies treated as not really worth the trouble to extirpate, so long as emulating them requires effort greater than the general public is willing to spare?
I don’t think any of the outcomes would be positive; but I’m curious what it is that makes ‘add more restrictions’ potentially a strategy that just leads to insularity in some cases; but spreads and infects broader norms in others.
Given the amount of effort periodically devoted to ‘harmonizing’ IP law toward the lowest common denominator it isn’t clear that the copy cops are confident that draconian policy will expand on its own, without considerable support; but that could also just reflect a demand that the outcome be delivered faster, hard to know.
