By Jon Hilsenrath and Anthony DeBarros
The future looked bright to all parties when Alphabet Inc.’s Google joined with Facebook Inc. and a Hong Kong partner in 2016 to build an 8,000-mile-long undersea fiber-optic-cable line connecting Los Angeles to Hong Kong on an information highway between superpowers.
But the project didn’t go as planned. The Trump administration nixed the application for U.S. approval, citing security concerns. Then the tech giants went their own way, routing their pieces of the cable line to the Philippines and Taiwan without the Hong Kong connection.