My background is (as a hobby) I’ve built medium-sized >700m PV/m esports analytics apps targetted for Asia, covering CN/most of SEA, and have had to get local connectivity and local hosting as an "outsider"

These countries are fairly insular.

China: GFW (we all know about this), ICP license, network pricing (China Telecom, Unicom, CN2, etc) for international traffic. It’s extremely difficult or impossible to serve Chinese customers from outside of China, especially if you need stable high bandwidth transport (and STUPIDLY EXPENSIVE). Almost all network peering ports in Los Angeles for CN/CU are oversubscribed to death, and CN2 traffic is disgustingly expensive internationally. It’s generally not possible to do anything at all without a “local partnership” type arrangement.

Korea: GFW (Korean censorship is heavy and extreme; there is really no other way putting this, people think SK is very “western”, it is not even close)[0]. You might see news about how Korea has fastest home internet - Korean connectivity is crap as soon as it leaves the country; the country is effectively a LAN, hosting outside of Korea is awful to inside, not possible to compete like that when all your assets are outside the country, and getting hosting is a bitch, and cost is hilarious.

Korea has KYC/“real name verification” laws like China, things like needing to get KSSN via a credit bureau via iPIN/mobile phone verification (since mobile phones also require KSSN to get; and <18s mobile phones are keylogged anyway) collected at registration if you want to do anything social for the most part.

The smaller countries in SEA tended to be a "if you don't speak the language, if you aren't from here, then fuck you, enjoy your highway robbery" to me. I paid bribes or else hardware would "go missing" or things "were impossible to do unfortunately", I paid prices significantly higher than any domestic purchasers would, the companies that had English sites you could literally see the prices have an extra decimal place just switching between the two versions.

I had to do a bunch of logic wrt balancing traffic. I had a server that had multiple physical NICs, each connecting to a different ISP. They don't necessarily like each other, so if I served a PLDT end-user from a Globe connection instead of PLDT, traffic may get forced intentionally through another country. There are incumbent ISPs that control a majority and charge far more that intentionally refuse to peer with any other ISP, and force domestic traffic out of the country to punish those users for not using them.

My site showed user profiles, which obviously includes their usernames. I had physical hardware shut down and removed by police in Thailand because someone had a username mocking the royalty there.

edit: I forgot my [0] - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/08/south-korea-only-thing... - the person involved is actually on the censorship board