&gt; For better or worse, the economic and political restrictions China enacted allowed for local companies like Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (makers of WeChat) to utterly dominate the Chinese market<p>Well, that&#x27;s the problem and the solution, as you hinted. At worst, the US giant Google is equivalent to what China has done. At best, it&#x27;s better, because the US government didn&#x27;t have to meddle quite so much to force such growth to occur.<p>So I don&#x27;t really see how Baidu is some terrific example of IT flourishing. If anything, Google, Facebook, and the companies that will follow their inevitable fall are noteworthy.<p>And if you don&#x27;t like Google, you have alternatives for every one of its services. Same with Facebook. Really viable alternatives, too.