{"id":359089,"date":"2020-07-07T15:34:32","date_gmt":"2020-07-07T13:34:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=359089"},"modified":"2020-07-07T15:36:07","modified_gmt":"2020-07-07T13:36:07","slug":"big-tech-headed-towards-a-showdown-with-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/internet\/359089-big-tech-headed-towards-a-showdown-with-china.html","title":{"rendered":"Big Tech headed towards a showdown with China"},"content":{"rendered":"

Facebook Inc., Google and Twitter Inc. — all of which are blocked in the mainland — are now headed toward a showdown with China that could end up making Hong Kong\u00a0feel<\/span>\u00a0more like Beijing.<\/p>\n

Hours after Hong Kong announced sweeping new powers to police the internet on Monday night, those companies plus the likes of Microsoft Corp. and Zoom Video Communications Inc. all suspended requests for data from the Hong Kong government. ByteDance Ltd.\u2019s TikTok, which has Chinese owners,\u00a0announced\u00a0it would pull its viral video app from the territory\u2019s mobile stores in the coming days.<\/p>\n

Their dilemma is stark: Bend to the law and infuriate Western nations increasingly at odds with China over political freedoms, or simply refuse and depart like Google did in China a decade ago over some of the very same issues. Much like that seismic event shook the mainland in 2010, Big Tech\u2019s reaction now could have a much wider impact on Hong Kong\u2019s future as a financial hub.<\/p>\n

\u201cGoogle is pretty important to people here, and if that\u2019s cut off then it\u2019s really extremely serious,\u201d said Richard Harris, a former director at Citi Private Bank who now runs Port Shelter Investment Management in Hong Kong. \u201cIn Hong Kong we don\u2019t know where the boundaries are, and that\u2019s threatening to a lot of business people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the past week, Hong Kong authorities have begun explaining how they\u2019ll enforce a law that officials in Beijing called a \u201csword of Damocles\u201d hanging over China\u2019s most strident critics. The legislation, which sparked the threat of sanctions from the Trump administration and outrage elsewhere, has had a chilling effect on pro-democracy protesters who demonstrated for months last year while also raising fresh questions for businesses.<\/p>\n

On Monday night, the Hong Kong government\u00a0announced\u00a0sweeping new police powers, including warrant-less searches, property seizures and online surveillance. If a publisher fails to immediately comply with a request to remove content deemed in breach of the law, police can seek a warrant to \u201ctake any action\u201d to remove it while also demanding \u201cthe identification record or decryption assistance.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are absolutely headed for a showdown, and there are no indications that the Hong Kong government is particularly prepared if Facebook or another company refuses a removal request,\u201d said James Griffiths, a journalist and author of \u201cThe Great Firewall: How to Build and Control an Alternative Version of the Internet.\u201d \u201cThese companies appear to have realized that there is no compromise they could make that would truly satisfy Beijing or make them seem trustworthy. This could make them more willing to stand up against Chinese censorship in Hong Kong.\u201d<\/p>\n

American internet giants have made overtures toward Beijing in recent years as the market exploded, but few have so far actually acceded to China\u2019s censorship framework.<\/p>\n

Of the rare examples, Microsoft\u2019s LinkedIn censors content to allow it to operate a Chinese version, while Apple Inc. complies with local regulations in policing its app store and other services. Reports that Google entertained the notion of returning — via potentially a censored version of search called Project Dragonfly — enraged lawmakers and its own employees torpedoed the idea.<\/p>\n

Worldwide Censorship<\/h3>\n

Twitter and Facebook have never been consistently available in China, but Mark Zuckerberg also flirted with Beijing before abandoning\u00a0<\/a>the notion as regulatory scrutiny and a user backlash grew at home. In both instances, external factors helped scupper the feasibility of operating in the world\u2019s No. 2 economy.<\/p>\n

\u201cI worked hard to make this happen. But we could never come to agreement on what it would take for us to operate there, and they never let us in,\u201d he said last year\u00a0in a speech at Georgetown University. \u201cAnd now we have more freedom to speak out and stand up for the values we believe in and fight for free expression around the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, the internet heavyweights are already censoring content across the world for both authoritarian regimes and western democracies, according to Ben Bland, a research fellow at the Lowy Institute in Australia. After a mass shooting last March in Christchurch, New Zealand, top social media companies joined with more than 40 countries in a concerted call to end the spread of extremist messaging online.<\/p>\n

Germany has banned online Nazi and right-wing extremist content, and most countries have blocks in place against online pornography and criminal activity. In Thailand, strict lese majeste laws lead to censorship of content deemed offensive to the royal family, while Communist-run Vietnam expunges anything deemed \u201canti-state.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reputational Damage<\/h3>\n

Big tech companies must gauge the importance of the markets in China and Hong Kong with possible reputational damage in other places they operate, according to Stuart Hargreaves, a law professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong who researches surveillance and privacy issues.<\/p>\n

\u201cI do not expect to see the Great Firewall extended from mainland China to Hong Kong, at least in the medium term,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is not necessary for Beijing\u2019s goal of tamping down certain sentiments and would be the obvious end of Hong Kong as a global city and its particular role as an Asian finance hub.\u201d<\/p>\n

The exit of TikTok, the viral video app that has insisted it operates independently of Beijing, could actually benefit the Communist Party by removing a forum pro-democracy protesters have used to post videos calling for an independent Hong Kong. Last year, demonstrators used the Reddit-like forum LIHKG as well as Telegram to organize leaderless protests.<\/p>\n

Platforms like Telegram that provide end-to-end encryption could become increasingly popular, said Joyce Nip, senior lecturer in Chinese Media Studies at the University of Sydney. Telegram said it has never shared data with Hong Kong authorities, adding that it doesn\u2019t have servers in the territory and doesn\u2019t store data there.<\/p>\n

\u2018Knife Edge\u2019<\/h3>\n

Hong Kong\u2019s leader, Carrie Lam, didn\u2019t answer a question Tuesday on her response to tech companies that stopped processing data requests from her government. Still, she played down any long-term impact on the city\u2019s position as a financial hub around the same time that U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo released a statement blasting the Communist Party\u2019s \u201cOrwellian censorship\u201d in Hong Kong.<\/p>\n

There \u201chas been an increasing appreciation of the positive effect of this national security legislation, particularly in restoring stability in Hong Kong as reflected by some of the market sentiments in recent days,\u201d Lam said a day after local stocks entered a bull market. \u201cSurely this is not doom and gloom for Hong Kong.\u201d<\/p>\n

The regulations stemmed from a new national security committee created by the law that includes Lam and Luo Huining, Beijing\u2019s top official in the city. While China\u2019s leaders know Hong Kong needs a free flow of information to function as a world-class financial center, \u201cmuch seems to rest in the hands of the few newly empowered bureaucrats who will police the new laws,\u201d according to Steve Vickers, chief executive officer of Steve Vickers and Associates, a political and corporate risk consultancy.<\/p>\n

\u201cForeign firms are on something of a knife edge here, caught between their natural affinity with freedom of information and their commercial desire to operate in the huge Chinese market,\u201d said Vickers, a former head of the Royal Hong Kong Police Criminal Intelligence Bureau. \u201cIt is now more a matter of what is actually done, as opposed to what is being said — by either China or the foreign IT companies — that will be the key.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now read: US-China feud gets nasty<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Facebook Inc., Google and Twitter Inc. — all of which are blocked in the mainland — are now headed toward a showdown with China that could end up making Hong Kong\u00a0feel\u00a0more like Beijing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341034,"featured_media":296352,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[60459,129,161,167,10642,405],"class_list":["post-359089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-internet","tag-big-tech","tag-china","tag-facebook","tag-google","tag-hong-kong","tag-twitter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359089"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341034"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=359089"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359089\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/296352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=359089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=359089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=359089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}