The Justice Department is taking a hard look at an undersea cable line financed by a Chinese investor for Google and Facebook on the grounds it carries far-reaching national security implications, opening a new front in President Trump’s trade fight with China.
The department leads a multiagency task force responsible for overseeing cable lines and has indicated staunch opposition to the 8,000-mile Trans-Pacific data project nearing completion, according to reports by the Wall Street Journal and other media outlets.
Trump administration officials raised concerns over the Chinese investor’s connections to the Beijing government and Huawei Technologies as well as the line’s direct link to Hong Kong, scene of huge anti-Chinese protests.
Much of the cable which originates in Los Angeles has been laid on the Pacific seabed under a temporary license, and commercial service is expected to begin by year’s end. But the U.S. government must issue a permanent license before it starts, and the Justice Department is lobbying hard against it in the task force. The Federal Communications Commission, which has the final say, usually goes along with the group’s recommendation.
A denial for such a large project on national security grounds would be unprecedented and signal that the Trump administration is adopting a tougher line on China projects.
Facebook and Google as Protectors
Long before the trade fight started, the Hong Kong backers of the project acknowledged the importance of recruiting high-profile American companies such as FacebookOpens a new window and Google as participants in the Pacific Light Cable Network project because of the legitimacy they would give the line.
The project, with an estimated cost of $300 million, is a showcase for the capacity of undersea fiber-optic lines to move massive amounts of data at jaw-dropping speeds: 144 terabits per second.
The line would be the first to use ultra-high-capacity transmissions to connect Asia and the United States. Its nearest competitor runs between Oregon and Japan with a capacity of 60 terabits per second. The Pacific line would reach faster speeds by using a new optical band with higher wavelengths – between 1,570 and 1,610 nanometers – than conventional bands transmitting signals.
Its cables would run from a data center in El Segundo, California, to Hong Kong and would also have connections to data centers owned by Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and other cloud service providers.
“Security probably isn’t the true driving concern here,†saysOpens a new window Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who leads the right-of-center American Action Forum advocacy group. “It is hard for me to imagine that Google and Facebook did not take steps to ensure the physical security of the cable during its laying. So it would seem that this objection comes down to one and only one thing: China.â€
Connecting with Asia
The project’s immediate purpose is to connect Facebook’s and Google’s cloud data centers in America with Hong Kong. Eventually it would connect to centers in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and Australia as well as China and generate a huge payoff for its investors from lucrative cloud storage contracts.
Despite the business benefits of the line, misgivings run deep among some in the administration to the project because of the Beijing government’s connections to the Chinese investor, the Dr. Peng Telecom & Media Group, the declining autonomy of Hong Kong, where pro-democracy protesters have been holding massive demonstrations for months and the Sino-American military rivalry in the South China Sea near the Philippines.
The Dr. Peng company is the fourth largest telecom in China and is a provider of security and surveillance services. Its Website lists as a partner the Huawei company, the Chinese smartphone and 5G infrastructure provider now banned in the United States on national security grounds and viewed as a bargaining chip in the trade fight.
Jamie Davies, who wrote an articleOpens a new window about the political troubles faced by the Pacific cable line, offered this perspective: “Once again, collateral damage to US firms has been ignored in the pursuit of national security.â€