Big tech and geopolitics are reshaping the internet’s plumbing
WHEN THE navies of Britain, Estonia and Finland held a joint exercise in the Baltic Sea earlier this month, their goal was not to hone warfighting skills. Instead, the forces were training to protect undersea gas and data pipelines from sabotage. The drills followed events in October when submarine cables in the region were damaged. Sauli Niinisto, the Finnish president, wondered whether the Chinese ship blamed for the mischief dragged its anchor on the ocean bed “intentionally or as a result of extremely poor seamanship”.
Submarine cables used to be seen as the internet’s dull plumbing. Now giants of the data economy, such as Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft, are asserting more control over the flow of data, even as tensions between China and America risk splintering the world’s digital infrastructure. The result is to turn undersea cables into prized economic and strategic assets.
Subsea data pipes carry almost 99% of intercontinental internet traffic. TeleGeography, a research firm, reckons there are 550 active or planned submarine cables that currently span over 1.4m kilometres. Each cable, which is typically a bundle of between 12 and 16 fibre-optic threads and as wide as a garden hose, lines the seabed at an average depth of 3,600 metres. Close to half have been added in the past decade. Newer ones are capable of transferring 250 terabits of data every second, the equivalent of 1.3m cat videos. Data may be stored in the cloud, but it flows under the ocean.
2023-12-20 08:42:15
Article from www.economist.com
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