Akamai and Chinese subsidy of residential internet

1

There’s been discussion here about the lack of volunteer NTP pool servers in China being partly due to very high costs of business internet connectivity in China compared to the rest of the world due to a policy offering heavily-subsidized residential internet financed by commercial internet markup.

I just saw that Akamai, one of the biggest global Content Delivery Networks, is winding down its operations in China and switching to being resellers of two Chinese-only CDNs. [1] I wonder if this is due to them being priced out of competitiveness in China by the residential subsidy? If so, I wonder what the wrinkle is that allows those Chinese CDNs to not have to pay similarly inflated business-internet costs? Is it cronyism? Oligarchy? Scale (they are their own ISP, in essence)? I’d love to hear from anyone with insight into the Chinese internet business.

[1] Akamai

2

I don’t know the answer to your question about why, but I noticed that AWS in mainland China is run by separate Chinese companies[1], as is Azure[2].

[1] Getting Started with AWS Services in AWS China (Beijing) Region and AWS China (Ningxia) Region | AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog

[2] Microsoft Azure in China

3

I used to work for a company that offered servers in China about 10 years ago. At the time (and probably still today), China was very protective of its internet, and there are many government restrictions and licenses required to run a network or website there. This is likely why so many global companies which are uniform through the rest of the world are so “weird” in China.
This is also part of why it’s so expensive to get bandwidth in China.