Letters to the Editor
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Trends in controlling technology
One of the items this year that got me thinking was the way that Rockstar Games Manhunt 2 game was effectively banned in the US. The simple version is that countries overseas banned the product which made it more costly for Rockstar to market multiple versions of the game to deal with varied regulations.
Why is this important? The day is coming when China has more users of Google, etc than "free speech countries" and that it just might become more cost effective for Google, etc to standardize on the Chinese version of their products which limit use elsewhere.
Notice I said "might" not "will." I am enough of a free market person to know that Google has incentives to not do this and there would be competitors who would step in to offer what people need/want. Also, China will potentially continue to liberalize as it gets wealthy and integrates more horizontally with the rest of the world. But, I was genuinely surprised when EU countries banned a game and that impacted whether the game could be bought in the US. Given that most countries do not have the equivalent of the First Amendment which is as near an absolute right in the US as there is, the full globalization of technology will create some conflicts where before they did not exist.