If at first you can’t do it, try it, try it again, says the old saying, and apparently this advice is worth double if you go to Facebook, a company that at this point tried a number of cartoons to install a high system. capacity internet channel between California and Hong Kong only to be continually thwarted by the US government.
On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook dismissed plans for the last iteration of its proposed cable, largely thanks to increasing pressure from U.S. national security officials, who fear that Hong Kong’s legal autonomy is increasingly threatened.
“Due to the US government’s continuing concerns about direct communication links between the United States and Hong Kong, we have decided to withdraw our FCC application,” said a Facebook spokeswoman in a statement. “We look forward to working with all parties to reconfigure the system to address the concerns of the US government.”
Although Facebook told the United States Federal Communications Commission that it withdrew its most recent construction order for the Hong Kong-Americas project – also known as HKA – it is not the first time the social media giant struggled to establish a fiber optic cable connection between the two regions. In September 2020, the Trump administration put an end to a separate plan that was proposed between Facebook and Google to build an 8,000-mile-long broadband cable between Hong Kong and Los Angeles.
This project – known as the Pacific Light Cable Network (PLCN) – was first proposed in 2016 and was fully developed with the intention of connecting the U.S. to Taiwan and the Philippines, as well as Hong Kong, before stopping. Currently, builders are still seeking permission to activate existing data links to bring the cable online.
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Like pro-democracy protests hit in Hong Kong in 2020, the Chinese government repressed the special administrative region, implementing new regulations on its internet as part of a wide new national security law. In July, tech titans, including Google, Facebook and Twitter, announced that they had suspended requests for data processing from Hong Kong law users oversight agencies due in large part to concerns that data sharing could be a violation of human rights.
“We believe that freedom of expression is a fundamental human right and we support people’s right to express themselves without fear for their safety or other repercussions,” a Facebook spokeswoman said at the time.