A New Future for Icanhazip

Chinese originated spam and abuse is so outrageously widespread, I don’t understand why there isn’t a conversation going on about cutting them off from the wider internet. They blocked most of it anyway.

China currently makes some absurdly large percentage of the world's consumer goods, and the discussions about producing them are probably being had over the internet. Cut them off of the internet and we have to rebuild manufacturing capacity everywhere else.

Which might not be a bad thing overall, but it's sure not gonna make any transnational corporation's bottom line happy over the next few quarters, so they'll be waving a lot of money at politicians to make this not happen.

China is an oppressive authoritarian state currently engaged in ethnic cleansing. How is enabling them indefinitely an option?

Because doing so would essentially push China towards a China-only internet, which they're already halfway towards.

The benefits of gobalization and the spread of democracy (or even just alternative governance models) via exposure to other cultures cannot be understated

I liked this hypothesis overall—that exposure to democracy through trade is sufficient to breed democracy in China. It’s a confident and peaceful approach, and I’m glad that we tested it. However, in this case, I believe we’ve disproven the hypothesis; continuing to run the same experiment unmodified and expecting improving results is signing up for disappointment.

> continuing to run the same experiment unmodified and expecting improving results is signing up for disappointment.

Maybe that's an acceptable price to pay for not being the ones to take the next step toward war. If war is a game in which "the only winning move is not to play", then maybe it's also true that when it comes to doing the peaceful thing, the only winning move is to keep on playing, even if it hurts us.