Good morning. The Sundance Film Festival kicks off today in Park City, providing what Variety describes as "an annual barometer of a rapidly changing film business that continues to evolve with scrappy new players and experimental distribution models."

• If you plan to ski, which you should, the Stein Eriksen Lodge's wild game chili with buffalo, elk and wild boar is a must.

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China ices out U.S. tech

Talk of Davos: The Chinese government is ramping up efforts to block United States' technology companies from doing business in China, a move that comes amid mounting tensions between Washington and Beijing.

• The Latest: Beijing has blocked Microsoft's Bing search engine from operating in China, something it has already done to several other companies including Facebook, Google and Twitter.

• "If the block proves to be permanent," NYT's Paul Mozur and Karen Weise write, "it would suggest that Western companies can do little to persuade China to give them access to ... the world’s largest internet market."

Meanwhile, Chinese Vice President Wang Qishan spoke in Davos yesterday and criticized the United States for attacking its technology companies: “It is imperative to respect national sovereignty and refrain from seeking technological hegemony," he said.

• Wang's remarks come as the U.S. is ramping up its scrutiny of Huawei on suspicion that it has been stealing U.S. technology secrets and spying on consumers.

• The Trump administration "wants to use indictments, along with export controls and other policy tools, as part of an arsenal to counter Chinese theft of trade and technology secrets," per WSJ.

The Big Picture: The United States and China are locked in an escalating war for the future of global technological hegemony. While the U.S. looks to crack down on Huawei and other companies, Beijing is cracking down on internet freedom and blocking Silicon Valley's access to their consumers.

• But ... as Mosur & Weiss note, foreign companies still hold out hope for access to China, which with its size and its thriving mobile phone culture represents a potentially vast market."

What's Next, via Reuters: "China and the United States will have in-depth discussions on various economic and trade issues during Chinese Vice Premier Liu He's U.S. visit next week."

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Jack Dorsey's 'public square'

Twitter chief Jack Dorsey is still wrestling with how to maintain his company's status as an open public square while also assuming responsibility for the hate speech and misinformation that takes place on his platform.

• Rolling Stone's Brian Hiatt, the latest stop on Dorsey's press tour, says the Twitter co-founder is "grappling, Sorcerer’s Apprentice-style, with an ever-growing slate of issues of daunting complexity."

Dorsey's top lines:

• "People see Twitter as a public square, and therefore they have expectations that they would have of a public square. ... It does come with certain expectations of freedom of expression, but everyone is watching one another."

• "I don’t think we should just say, 'The network takes care of itself.' We need to say, 'How do we not determine true or false, but how do we determine is it misleading?' Then, how do we stop the dissemination of misleading information before it reaches significant exposure?"

That's a long row to hoe ... Over at NYT, Farhad Manjoo argues that Twitter has become "the epicenter of a nonstop information war, an almost comically undermanaged gladiatorial arena where activists and disinformation artists and politicians and marketers gather to target and influence the wider media world."

• "Twitter will ruin us, and we should stop."

🐦 Rally the Market 🐦

Speaking of Twitter: The Market is open 24/7 at @dylanbyers. Though like Farhad, I'm trying to cut back.

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Digital media's day of slaughter

BuzzFeed's Jonah Peretti and Verizon Media Group's K. Guru Gowrappan have both announced plans to cut hundreds of employees at their respective companies, the latest casualties in the ongoing contraction of the ad-supported digital media industry.

• The Big Picture: Digital media, which plays for table scraps while Google and Facebook eat up the majority of the digital ad market, is facing a reckoning as growth slows and investors come calling for even the most marginal of profits.

The Damage:

• BuzzFeed will cut 15% of its workforce, affecting about 250 jobs across the news division and other parts of the company.

• Verizon Media Group, which owns AOL and Yahoo, will cut 7% of its workforce, affecting about 800 jobs across the company.

• The cuts follow layoffs at Mic, Refinery29 and other digital media companies, as well as ongoing cuts at legacy media outlets like Gannett, which laid off journalists across the country this week.

How to Read It: The BuzzFeed cuts are the most significant indicator, because that company is a leader in digital media — it has a monthly readership of 690 million — and is on track to turn a profit in 2019 after hitting its revenue goal of $300 million last year.

• As I wrote last year, digital media is a break-even business. The strongest companies spend years if not decades trying to achieve profitability, and even then their profit margins are often just a few percentage points.

• In a memo to staff, Peretti said "revenue growth by itself isn’t enough to be successful in the long run," and that the company must reduce costs and improve its operating model "so we can thrive and control our own destiny, without ever needing to raise funding again." (Disclaimer: NBCUniversal, the parent company of NBC News, is an investor in BuzzFeed.)

What's Next: "Cut costs and maintain growth" is the new mandate at almost every digital media company.

• My colleague Chris Hayes tweets: "What if there is literally no profitable model for digital news? Or none that actually scales and endures without, say, the established readership base and brand of the NYT. This seems...increasingly likely to me?"

Bonus ... Amid the tumult, Pamela Drucker Mann is moving to put all Condé Nast titles behind a paywall.

Market Links

• Tim Cook curbs Apple's reliance on Samsung (Bloomberg)

• Randy Freer drops Hulu cost after Netflix's price hike (Verge)

• Sumner Redstone's titanic battle ends with a whimper (LAT)

• Bryan Singer goes to war with The Atlantic (Deadline)

• Sean Hannity joins the Fox News streaming service (Variety)

Bloomberg/Getty

Katzenberg and Whitman talk Quibi

Fortune's Sheila Marika checks in with Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman on the status of Quibi, their new venture that aims to make snackable premium content for the mobile age:

• "The company plans to charge $5 a month for viewing with limited ads and $8 a month for an ad-free version."

• "Quibi reckons it can pay around $100,000 a minute for its premium shows. That’s far less than the $200,000 to $300,000 a minute that Katzenberg says Netflix and HBO pay for top-tier fare but more than what producers are paying for existing short-form videos."

• "Quibi sold stakes to 10 film and TV companies [which] invested about $25 million each in the startup ... enough to give each a stake in its success. The aim of such deals, in part, is to allow Quibi to tap the studios’ creative talent and resources."

Hollywood's Favorite Question: Will it work?

• 21st Century Fox President Peter Rice: “Google, Facebook, Snap, and others have wanted people to make short-form content for them. But there’s been no real business model. It was for the greater glory of those platforms only.”

• Marika describes Katzenberg and Whitman as "confident but not naive about the magnitude of their gambit," and notes that they've already landed impressive talent, "from A-list directors to industry big shots like journalist Janice Min and music executive Doug Herzog."

What's Next: I'll be interviewing Katzenberg and Whitman in March at this year's SXSW Festival in Austin.

Back to Sundance: THR's Tatiana Siegel looks at 12 films that could be top talker at this year's festival.

See you tomorrow.