If it doesn’t work out at first, try it, try again, the old maxim goes, and apparently that advice counts double if you’re Facebook, a company that has so far tried a cartoonish number of times to get a high- capacity internet connection between California and Hong Kong, only to be constantly thwarted by the US government.
On Wednesdays, the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook had scrapped plans for the latest version of the proposed cable, largely thanks to mounting pressure from US national security officials who are concerned that Hong Kong’s legal autonomy is increasingly under threat.
“Due to ongoing concerns by the US government about direct communications links between the United States and Hong Kong, we have decided to withdraw our FCC filing,” 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While Facebook told the US Federal Communications Commission that it had withdrawn its most recent build application for the Hong Kong-Americas project – aka the HKA – it is not the first time the social media giant has made efforts to establish a fiber optic cable connection between the two regions. In September 2020, the Trump administration put the kibosh on a separate plan drawn up between Facebook and Google to lay an 8,000-mile broadband cable between Hong Kong and Los Angeles.
That project – known as the Pacific Light Cable Network (PLCN) – was first proposed in 2016 and was rolled out with the intention of connecting the US with Taiwan and the Philippines, in addition to Hong Kong, before coming to a standstill. Currently, builders are still asking for permission to activate the existing data links to bring the cable online.
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As pro-democracy protests raged on in Hong Kong in 2020, the Chinese government cracked down on the Special Administrative Region by introducing new regulations on the Internet as part of a sweeping action new national safety legislationIn July, tech titans including Google, Facebook and Twitter announced they had suspended processing of Hong Kong law user data requests enforcement agencies largely due to concerns that sharing the data could amount to a human rights violation.
“We believe that freedom of speech is a fundamental human right and support people’s right to express themselves without fear for their safety or other repercussions,” said a Facebook spokeswoman. said at the time.