Quad9 (https://www.quad9.net/) exists and is a 501(c)(3) DNS provider with a relatively reasonable privacy policy. It supports direct DNS resolving and has DOH servers available.
The problem is not so much the lack of available infrastructure but the lack of awareness of alternatives existing, so everyone ends up just using the known defaults (google or cloudflare mostly)
Reachability on an x is done by swiping down the bottom edge of the screen, and it really does feel a lot more natural than the double-tap of the older iPhones.
What Disney did is perfectly legal. They fired people, and hired a third-party contractor to fill the positions for cheaper. That third party contractor was "unable" find Americans to fill the positions of "contracted IT worker" so used H1-B workers to fill roles at the contracting agency, not disney. They were then contracted out by the agency (who they officially work for) to do work at Disney.
It is incredibly shitty and absolutely against the spirit of the visas, but it's not against the letter of the law.
I'm in Australia where we get all that stuff (and amazon sells books and not a whole lot else) and my tax rate (in a relatively high tax bracket) is ~35%, a chunk of which is paying off my (government run, non-profit) university debt. Judging by the sibling comments, it seems like that high cost is about -5% tax at best...
China is such a massive place that Chinese players in particular don't need to compete outside china. Two of the largest social networks, QZone and Sina Weibo at >645,000,000 and >500,000,000 users respectively are at the level where they're only smaller than facebook and they're used almost exclusively in one country.
You don't need to compete internationally when you can get that kind of userbase domestically, and the Great Firewall is absolutely and to some extent intentionally a big part of that.
The homepage is almost completely unusable on firefox on OS X. The scrolling is jerky as hell, things pop in and out seemingly at random and the whole feel is so broken and terrible that I was so distracted by it that I didn't actually read any of the content.
It's even worse that on pages completely devoid of moving content and general broken js, the scrolling is still awful any time you get near the big picture in the footer.
A big picture, I might add, which has absolutely nothing to do with what I am guessing from hn comments is the actual point of the site.
And as a domestic student those fees are also subsidized so the actual debt is relatively small (software engineering at a middling university ends up just shy of $30k for the entire degree)
If you actually looked through the images page you will find that when the single word "Coke" is used (most notably on the Diet Coke can, but also on occasional promotional items) it's in a much more modern serifed font, rather than the script font used for the classic Coca Cola logo.
The problem is not so much the lack of available infrastructure but the lack of awareness of alternatives existing, so everyone ends up just using the known defaults (google or cloudflare mostly)