The IEEE 802.11 standard includes an optional encryption capability, the Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) however, WEP is vulnerable to attack and can easily be broken, therefore WEP was recently temporarily supplemented with Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) which offers improvements over WEP while a newer, more secure protocol 802.11i is developed. However, China has now introduced a new security protocol called WLAN Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure (WAPI) which is not a part of the IEEE 802.11 standard and is not interoperable with 802.11 which means that there will be two incompatible wireless security standards which will be inconvenient and more expensive for users. More importantly, because China is a large developing market, WAPI is an attempt by China to exert itself internationally as a major player in technological innovation by creating their own standard, even though this has the possibility to cause immense economic harm to established networking companies and disruption in the worldwide technological infrastructure.
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