New York Times

Within a 48-hour period this week, many of the world’s internet giants took steps that would have been unthinkable for them even months earlier. Taken independently, these changes might have felt incremental and isolated — the kind of refereeing and line-drawing that happens every day on social media. But arriving all at once, they felt like something much bigger: a sign that the Wild Wild Web — the tech industry’s decade-long experiment in unregulated growth and laissez-faire platform governance — is coming to an end.

A year after protesters in Hong Kong jubilantly defied Chinese rule, the national leader, Xi Jinping, has opened a long-term counteroffensive in the territory, signing a sweeping new security law that sets obedience to Beijing above the former British colony’s civil freedoms.