If you do not succeed initially, try, try again, go the old maximum, and apparently that advice counts double if you are Facebook, a company that at this point has tried a cartoon-like number of times to build a high-capacity Internet channel between California and Hong Kong, only to be continually thwarted by the US government.
On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook has scrapped plans for the latest iteration of its proposed cable, largely thanks to increasing pressure from U.S. national security officials who are concerned that Hong Kong’s legal autonomy is increasingly in jeopardy.
“Due to the continuing concern of the US Government regarding direct communications links between the United States and Hong Kong, we have decided to withdraw our FCC application,” a Facebook spokesman said in a statement. “We look forward to reconfiguring the system with all parties to meet the concerns of the US Government.”
While Facebook has told the US Federal Communications Commission that it has withdrawn its most recent building application for the Hong Kong-America project – also known as the HKA – it is not the first time the social media giant attempted to establish a fiber optic cable connection between the two regions. In September 2020, the Trump administration placed the kibosh on a separate plan outlined between Facebook and Google to build an 8,000-mile broadband cable between Hong Kong and Los Angeles.
The project – known as the Pacific Light Cable Network (PLCN) – was first proposed in 2016 and was fully built with the intention of connecting the US alongside Hong Kong to Taiwan and the Philippines before it came to a standstill. Currently, builders are still seeking permission to activate the existing data links to bring the cable online.
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Like protests for democracy in 2020 in Hong Kong, the Chinese government the special administrative region stalled by applying new regulations on its internet as part of a comprehensive implementation new national security legislation. In July, tech titans, including Google, Facebook and Twitter, announced that they had suspended processing of user data requests from Hong Kong law enforcement agencies largely due to concern that sharing the data could amount to a violation of human rights.
“We believe that freedom of expression is a fundamental human right and support the right of people to express themselves without fear for their safety or other consequences,” a Facebook spokesman said. said at that point.