China vs. Opera

Quote:

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Opera, the maker of Web browsers such as the popular "Opera Mini" for Java-based mobile phones, has been accused of betraying its users in China, by apparently caving in to top-level demands to stop allowing China-based users to use the international version of the Opera Mini browser.

This stems from a unique feature of Opera Mini, where the traffic is sent via Opera's own servers, for the speed and convenience of its users, most of whom use the slowest GPRS mobile connection. But in China, the pleasant side effect of that rerouting has been that Opera Mini is effectively allowing users in China to easily circumvent the so-called Great Firewall of government-implemented Web filtering. Thus, Chinese users, up until yesterday, were merrily logging into Facebook--which has been blocked here pretty much all year--on their mobile phones using Opera Mini. Not any more.

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http://asia.cnet.com/blogs/sinobytes...tm?id=63015016

Looks like our Comrades over there at Opera are making some waves...

This brings an unusual thought to mind;

Can a company 'discriminate' against a country - i.e. Not supply product because the company as an entity "chooses" not to.

And at which point are you no longer able to differentiate between the structure of a country and the structure of a company. Some companies are more powerful and have more resources than any single country, and yet can exist in multiple countries despite any differences.

Think 'I, Robot' manufacture and Massive Dynamic from TV series Fringe.