Hong Kong is facing a dramatic decline of one of its most important advantages – a free and open internet – a defining trait that sets it apart from mainland China where Facebook, Twitter, Google and most major foreign news sites are blocked.
China has abandoned the "one country, two systems" model it promised in Hong Kong, and is now applying the internet censorship of Mainland China. From what I can tell, it seems likely that the protest movement is over there.
While the question of managing what speech should be acceptable on various online communities is a complex one, and there's a very long continuum between broad suppression of anything critical of the government and targeted removal of trolling and spam, I still get the chills whenever I go to access some important part of the internet and find the whole thing missing, like coming back to my digital hometown only to find that an invading army had wiped it out.
I remember travelling the world in 2009 and noticing pieces of the world's knowledge were just missing. Flickr was missing in Dubai, Youtube was missing in Turkey. I don't often feel patriotism, but activating a VPN inside Mainland China to reach my American-owned internet services was one of those moments.
Sadly, the fundamental infrastructure of the internet is centralised. Breaking the Chinese firewall impasse will take more than setting up a CDN across the world and accessing content from single points of entry. Yes, we can setup new frontends with new addresses as we please, but it will forever be a cat and mouse game.