I think it's a wrong decision by Apple and I hope they will change their mind once this hits the press. It's a bad look for them.
Can someone please explain why the protests still continue when the original extradition law was revoked and even was prevented to emerge again. What's on the protesters agenda now?
[automerge]1570705414[/automerge]
Also would like to add that it's not an issue of free speech. You are free to speak whatever you want, on a platform you own. If you use someone else platform they have all the rights to ban you. For example Twitter has all the rights to ban its users if they suspect Russian or Nazi propaganda and this won't be an issue of free speech. Unfortunately Twitter too careful with keeping us "engaged" and reluctant to ban anyone.
For your second point - it's always far more complex than that. Human beings live in societies. It has been in the US for example well established in law that private land can be a public space where one's legal rights exist. Not many people for example believe that a business should be allowed to refuse to serve a black man. There simply isn't, in real life, the clear cut distinction you make. The internet, and twitter etc, depend on society and if it becomes the way society operates and communicates, it is emphatically of interest to the people to see free speech on that platform.
The alternative is twitter can ban people - you say they re reluctant but they have been extremely trigger happy banning people - but then they are effectively a newspaper with an editor - and have to take responsibility for their platform.
Most of these ideas were very widely accepted and settled for decades. Newspapers for example can be sued in ways a telephone company cannot. I see no reason why tech companies should be allowed to exist in some different way and sooner or later the law will catch up in just the same way tax codes will eventually catch up.
As for the protests it's a huge, long and complex issue. The wikipedia page on them is actually pretty even handed and detailed though lacks the context on this history of the past decades. Would the American Revolution have been cancelled if the tax on tea had been changed? No, that was just a spark, something that made plain a larger issue (in that case taxation without representation). It is hard to imagine how people feel in Hong Kong - a tiny place sitting right next to a blood soaked tyranny with a huge army that has made no secret of the fact it wants to totally dominate and crush Hong Kong and is held back only by the fact the world would see it. The Chinese government for example can ethnically cleanse Uighurs and largely keep it secret so do so. If they could do the same to Hong Kong they would - and that law would have been the first step. The extradition law was not some administrative detail - it meant everyone in Hong Kong could be taken to China where they would have no defence against torture and murder.
Imagine a US government in the 1960s tried to force through a law allowing the USSR to extradite anyone they wanted. And there were protests that the police tried to brutally crush, and under immense pressure the government backed down. Would everyone just say "ok great, that wasn't a big issue, glad they listened, surely they won't try anything bad again"? And then imagine the US is a tiny city state on the border of the USSR and the Russians have an army ready at the border. And then when there is a protest against the founding date of the USSR a policeman shoots a protestor. What I trying to say is the stakes are incredibly high, the pressure is immense, Hong Kong is right on the edge of an evil tyranny and the people there are giving everything they can.
To be frank I am surprised. I think in the long term it will be very hard for them to resist as the Chinese government will play the long game and slowly whittle away at freedoms and the separate culture and in 100 years I would be surprised if HK survives in the way it does today. Yet still they fight. They are the equivalent of a Jewish group resisting the Nazis in Germany in 1938. That is why so many of us are furious with Apple for siding with the tyrants so clearly.
