If at first you fail, try, try again, the old maxim works and apparently that advice matters twice if you are Facebook, a company that has tried, for the time being, several times a cartoon to install a capacity internet pipe between California and Hong Kong to be continually hampered by the US government.
Wednesday, Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook has dropped plans for the latest iteration of its proposed cable, largely due to growing pressure from U.S. national security officials who fear Hong Kong’s legal autonomy is increasingly jeopardized.
“Because of the US government’s ongoing concerns about direct communications between the United States and Hong Kong, we have decided to withdraw our FCC application,” a Facebook spokeswoman said in a statement. “We look forward to working with all parties to reconfigure the system to address the concerns of the US government.”
While Facebook told the US Federal Communications Commission that it had withdrawn its latest construction application for the Hong Kong-America project – also known as HKA -, not the first time the social media giant tried to establish a fiber optic cable connection between the two regions. In September 2020, the Trump administration put Kibosh on a separate plan that it developed 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 completely built with the intention of connecting the US to Taiwan and the Philippines in addition to Hong Kong before it stalled. Manufacturers are still seeking permission to enable existing data links to bring the cable online.
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As a pro-democracy protest stole in Hong Kong in 2020, the Chinese government repressed the special administrative region by implementing new regulations on the Internet, as part of an expansion new national security law. In July, technology titans, including Google, Facebook and Twitter, announced that they had suspended processing of applications for user data under Hong Kong law. law enforcement agencies largely due is concerned that the exchange of data could be a violation of human rights.
“We believe that freedom of expression is a fundamental human right and we support the right of people to express themselves without fear for their own safety or other repercussions,” a Facebook spokeswoman said. SAPS then.