Thursday, October 19, 2000

The US managed to strongarm China into adopting a lousy mobile telephony standard (CDMA). Chinese adoption of this standard will be a windfall for its owner, US company Qualcomm, who lobbied hard to get the US government to force the Chinese government to force Chinese companies into using it. China, quite sensibly, was trying to use the superior GSM standard the rest of the planet uses. Irony of ironies, the US possibly made Chinese entry into the WTO contingent on force-feeding this particular standard to Chinese consumers. So much so for free trade.

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