Hyperscalers are carving up the ocean floor into private internet highways The dominance of US-based hyperscalers like Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon in subsea cables has reshaped the industry and put critical infrastructure at risk, an Australian think tank claims. Over the past decade, the amount of international subsea capacity used by the four hyperscalers increased from 10 percent to 71 …
"large tech companies 'enjoy a remarkable degree of freedom from regulation and accountability for their activities and the content they carry' "
Yup. And, in my opinion, it's because the Internet has never been considered as something important by governments across the world.
But that is changing. All you need to do is look at how many governments have officials with their personal social media page when they should be talking through official government channels. Or look at how many governments actively control, at sometimes forbid, Internet activity. Oh sure, the ones that do that now cannot be counted as democracies, but the day is coming when Internet regulations will be decided upon and enforced.
An undersea cable is a big project. It needs to cross quite a bit of land, and many countries take an active, interventionist attitude to building on the shoreline in particular. To say nothing of crossing the ocean floor itself.
So there must be plenty of opportunity for the governments concerned to get concessions from the party doing the building. Lots of permits required. They could demand, e.g., that the sponsor's traffic be limited to a fraction of the total bandwidth, with the rest available to the public on terms set by a public regulator.
>hyperscalers are not immune to geopolitics
*snort*
Google, at least, has been an active and partisan participant since at least the late 00s. Facebook was revealed in recent years to be acting similarly; recently confirmed and apologised for same in writing to Congress. Amazon has less direct influence but Alexa recently showed that the employees wish it were otherwise.
As cautiously understated elliptical allusions go, "not immune" is a blinder.
Wow, rampant unregulated technology! Is it 1995 all over again?
Seriously, I'm not even sure what needs to be copied from say Europe to USA at these data rates. How many times can you copy cat memes, Kardashian pics and unwanted copies of "Never Gonna Give You Up" across the Atlantic in one day anyways? Mirroring your data much Google?
(Ok, so probably these are the subconscious internal musings of the next generation of ChatGPT and it is kinda nice to see some of that "dark fiber" starting to see some use after all these years)
The undersea cables combined with reliance on global tech is a huge risk.
If a conventional but otherwise full on WW3 breaks out, those cables wont survive long. Sensible nations would be building self-reliance (in all areas) and using cross border trade and comms as icing on a cake. But ... the globalists don't want nation states because they are hard to control.
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