Protectionism in its different forms can have benefits, and particularly Australian history shows that.
Australia has/had a competitive advantage in mining and wool production, and as a result, the income per capita was extremely high. However to populate the country and build up a complete society, you need teachers, farmers etc. - but in those fields there was no competitive advantage. As a result, incomes differed substantially, leading to social imbalances. E.g. why should someone study to become a teacher, when a mining dude without education can earn much more?
To counteract this, certain markets were protected with custom duties etc. - which lead to drop of the per capita wealth, because certain goods became more expensive.
Now people wanted the best of both - stabilize society and raise the standard of living. So what they did was investing in education and the services sector, because this way they could offer
goods of higher value, which less developed countries with cheap labouring costs could not.
Kite wise, we see a combination of both - R&D is done in Australia, USA, France etc. from qualified, educated people, and manufactured cheap somewhere else. As long as work conditions are fair, I don't see any problem with that. It creates jobs in poor countries and raises their standard of living. More people can afford kites, which benefits the richer countries where they are sold/designed.
In terms of kite retail vs internet - like I said before, I don't think kite shops will go away, because
they offer additional value that an online shop can not deliver as good. Letting people demo kites, rapairs, the personal factor..
Other retail examples - a clothing store offers the benefit of letting you try on clothes, which is not possible online.
A music store or bookstore - well unless you are the nostalgic/social type who wants to hold a physical product in his hands, chat to people at the store etc, there is no additional value as compared to buying the product online, either in digital or analog form.
So to conclude: It is all about offering value, and those retailers who can offer more value than an online shop (service, advice, cool promos, funky ambience, smoking hot sales chicks, whatever), they don't have to fear the internet.
And cheap overseas stuff with inadequate quality (even for the cheap price) will only work in the short term, because - they don't offer appropriate value, which the customer will figure out. And with the capability of better knowledge exchange, the internet itself will make it easier to sort out those black sheep.
