Seeds of an Asian European Union? Regionalism as a hedge against the United States on telecommunications technology in Japan and Germany

Next Generation Internet Policy in Japan, China and India

“…The government supported research and development of IPv6 technologies, as well as field experiments for IPv6 and content distribution. Tax breaks were also given to firms that introduced IPv6ready routers and could get property tax breaks from the local government (Tilton 2007;Yoshimatsu 2007). At a speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2001, Prime Minister Mori explained that key element of its regional strategy: 'the transition to IPv6 will expand the digital opportunities for those developing countries that are in an earlier stage of IT development, and in this way Japan can make a global contribution' (Mori 2001b).…”

Domestic legitimacy politics and varieties of regionalism in East Asia

“…Under the new permissive context in the early 2000s, China, and South Korea have cooperated on joint research and development, standards, and personnel training in order to offset American dominance in telecommunications, culminating in a 2004 plan by the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 'to build an Asian Super High-speed Information Network that would be centered in Japan and cover Asia with a fiber optic cable and super highspeed Internet satellite'. 58 In the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis, there were similar attempts by South Korean President Kim Dae-jung to pursue East Asian regionalism as a way to reduce dependence on the US, even as he actively sought American and IMF assistance. He stated that, 'Northeast Asia has no economic community and is, therefore, vulnerable to financial crises whenever one occurs within the region.…”