One of the most interesting elements is coverage of the fact that China is installing Chinese-made routers because of the threat posed by foreign equipment.

From the SCMP:

Fang Binxing, president at the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications and widely believed to be the father of China’s “great firewall”, which restricts access to the web, told News China in October last year that foreign equipment was a serious threat to national security.

“China should set up a national information security review commission as soon as possible,” he said.

Telecom companies have started replacing foreign-made equipment.

China Unicom quietly replaced all Cisco routers at a key backbone hub in Wuxi, Jiangsu last year, according to the National Business Daily.

The changes are being kept quiet to avoid panic and embarrassment to the government, people in the industry say.”

Sound familiar? A very similar debate is happening in the US and Australia about whether equipment created by Huawei and ZTE can be trusted from a national security standpoint in the US and Australia. The fact that both China and the US (and Australia) see this as a threat, is yet another step toward the balkanization of technology.

No one disputes there is a balkanization of the internet. But ultimately, the a large swath of the underlying equipment may become balkanized.