Tech Brief: The Big Tech Crossroads in Hong Kong

• Google, Twitter, Telegram, Microsoft, Zoom, Facebook and its messaging service WhatsApp have announced plans to suspend requests from the Hong Kong government and law enforcement authorities for information on users in the wake of a new national security law imposed on the territory by China.
• The legislation, passed last week, criminalises any act of secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign or external forces, effectively curtailing freedom of speech and political dissent against the Communist Party, prompting residents to alter their digital footprints or remove their presence entirely from social media. There's also been a surge in downloads of encrypted chat app Signal.

• Popular Chinese video-sharing service TikTok, which has worked hard to distance itself from Beijing, said it intends to pull out entirely out of Hong Kong and halt its operations "in light of recent events." Its parent ByteDance, however, already operates Douyin, a popular sister app to TikTok that's only available in mainland China.
• Apple, which relies on the Chinese market for a significant portion of its sales and hosts iCloud servers in the country, has so far not commented on the development. Unlike Google, Facebook and Twitter, Apple has China at the centre of its iPhone and Mac manufacturing pipeline, and pulling out of the country would be catastrophic in ways more than one.
• The wider dilemma has put big tech companies at a crossroads, who must now decide if they want to continue operating in Hong Kong. If anything, the moves takes us one step closer to the balkanisation of the internet (aka "splinternet") where we have a United States internet, E.U. internet, Russian internet, Chinese internet, or Indian internet, with geographical barriers preventing the free flow of information online amid an escalating war over control of the global internet.