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I began this undertaking the best way most of my investigations start: with a query that appeared easy and turned out to be something however. I needed to know who owns the bodily cables that carry the web throughout oceans. The reply, as soon as I mapped it, advised a narrative about energy that felt uncomfortably acquainted.
Ninety-five % of intercontinental web site visitors travels by undersea fiber optic cables. Not satellites, not some ethereal “cloud” floating above us. Cables. Bodily, tangible traces of glass fiber, thinner than a backyard hose, laid throughout ocean flooring by specialised ships. There are roughly 550 lively or deliberate cable techniques worldwide, based on TeleGeography’s Submarine Cable Map, and so they symbolize the precise, materials spine of the worldwide web. Once you ship a message from Nairobi to New York, or stream video from Singapore to São Paulo, the information virtually actually travels by one among these cables. And somebody owns each one among them.
I spent a number of months tracing possession constructions, consortium agreements, and touchdown rights for the foremost cable techniques connecting continents. What emerged was a map that tracks, with eerie precision, onto the geography of colonial extraction. The cables land in the identical ports, observe the identical routes, and serve the identical directional logic because the telegraph traces and commerce routes of the nineteenth century British, French, and Portuguese empires. The expertise modified. The topology didn’t.
The geography of extraction, digitized
Take into account Africa. The continent of 1.4 billion individuals is related to the worldwide web primarily by cables that run alongside its coasts, touchdown at a handful of port cities that have been, in virtually each case, colonial buying and selling posts. Djibouti, Mombasa, Lagos, Dakar, Cape City. These have been the nodes of useful resource extraction for European empires. At the moment they’re the nodes of knowledge transit, and the cable techniques touchdown there are overwhelmingly owned or majority-funded by corporations headquartered in the US and Europe.
The 2Africa cable, one of many largest subsea cable initiatives ever undertaken, is backed by a consortium that features Meta, China Cell Worldwide, MTN, Orange, Vodafone, and several other others. It should encircle the African continent, with touchdown factors in 33 nations. Meta’s involvement is probably the most telling. The corporate has change into one of many largest personal buyers in undersea cable infrastructure globally, and its curiosity in connecting African markets is inseparable from its curiosity in capturing African customers. Free Fundamentals, Meta’s controversial program providing restricted web entry in creating nations, was the soft-power precursor. Undersea cables are the exhausting infrastructure.
The sample extends throughout the International South. South America’s connectivity to the remainder of the world runs primarily by cables touchdown in Fortaleza, Brazil, a metropolis that served as a key node in Portugal’s Atlantic commerce community. Southeast Asia’s web connectivity is concentrated by chokepoints in Singapore, the place I stay, and a handful of different former colonial ports. The Strait of Malacca, as soon as the vital bottleneck for spice commerce managed by successive European powers, is now a vital bottleneck for submarine cable routes.
I’m scripting this from Singapore, some of the related nodes on the planet, sitting on the intersection of dozens of submarine cable techniques. The infrastructure benefit I take pleasure in here’s a direct inheritance of this city-state’s function within the British Empire’s communications community. That historical past didn’t finish; it simply obtained fiber optic cladding.
The brand new landlords of the web
The possession shift that ought to concern everybody occurred quietly over the previous decade. Traditionally, submarine cables have been constructed and owned by telecommunications consortia: teams of nationwide telcos who collectively funded development and shared capability. This meant that whereas the geography was colonial, the possession was a minimum of partially distributed amongst state-backed or nationally regulated entities.
That period is over. A 2022 evaluation from the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Analysis Lab discovered that Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon now personal or lease roughly 70% of undersea bandwidth globally. Google alone has important possession stakes in a minimum of 20 cable techniques. These corporations aren’t sharing capability by consortia. They’re constructing personal cables, for their very own site visitors, on their very own phrases. Google’s Dunant cable, connecting the US and France, carries completely Google site visitors. Its Equiano cable, operating from Portugal to South Africa, serves Google’s cloud infrastructure wants in Africa.
This represents a elementary transformation in who controls the bodily layer of the web. When a handful of personal corporations personal the cables, they management the capability, the routes, the touchdown factors, and the phrases of entry. They resolve which areas get high-bandwidth connections and which don’t. They decide latency, reliability, and, finally, what sort of digital financial system is feasible in a given nation. In my current piece on how the worldwide south is being surveilled into compliance beneath the banner of improvement, I explored how expertise platforms lengthen management by infrastructure that seems benign. Submarine cables are maybe probably the most literal model of that dynamic: the bodily wires by which digital dependency is maintained.
The Center East presents a revealing case examine in how this performs out. The area’s fast rise as a digital hub, with huge investments in knowledge facilities and cloud infrastructure throughout the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, has pushed a surge in new cable initiatives. However the possession constructions of those cables nonetheless tilt towards the established tech giants and the legacy telcos of former colonial powers. The area’s rising market energy has given Gulf states extra leverage than many International South nations in negotiating cable touchdown rights and possession stakes, however the elementary structure of dependency persists. Knowledge flowing between Center Jap nations usually routes by European hubs earlier than reaching its vacation spot, a digital model of the previous imperial sample the place commerce between colonies needed to go by the metropole.
Why touchdown rights are the brand new territorial concessions
The politics of the place a cable lands are as consequential as who owns it. Cable touchdown stations require authorities permission, and the negotiations round touchdown rights are, in apply, geopolitical negotiations. Nations that host touchdown stations acquire financial advantages: knowledge facilities cluster close by, tech corporations set up native presences, jobs are created. Nations bypassed by main cable routes are consigned to larger latency, decrease bandwidth, and digital marginality.
This creates a dynamic that mirrors the nineteenth century scramble for telegraph concessions. European powers negotiated unique rights to land telegraph cables in colonial territories, giving them management over data flows and, by extension, political and financial affect. At the moment’s cable touchdown negotiations contain comparable asymmetries. A rustic just like the Democratic Republic of Congo or Madagascar, determined for connectivity, has restricted leverage when negotiating with a consortium led by Meta or Google. The phrases of entry are set by the cable house owners.
Analysis printed by Nicole Starosielski in her guide The Undersea Community paperwork how up to date cable routes ceaselessly overlay historic telegraph routes, and the way the bodily touchdown websites chosen for brand new cables are usually the identical websites used for over a century. This persistence is partly geological (some coastlines are higher fitted to cable landings) however largely political and financial. Present infrastructure, established relationships, and concentrations of capital all favor the identical places that empire favored.
I discovered this sample replicated persistently. Once I traced the route of the Asia-Africa-Europe 1 (AAE-1) cable, connecting Southeast Asia to Europe by the Center East, its path by the Suez Canal and Mediterranean follows a route that may be immediately recognizable to a nineteenth century telegraph engineer. The expertise superior by orders of magnitude. The facility geometry barely shifted.
The phantasm of a borderless web
There’s a persistent mythology, cultivated by the expertise trade, that the web is inherently decentralized and borderless. This mythology serves a particular operate: it obscures the fabric circumstances of digital connectivity and makes the facility relations embedded in infrastructure invisible. If the web is all over the place and nowhere, then questions of possession, management, and extraction appear irrelevant.
However the web just isn’t borderless. It’s profoundly bodily, and its physicality concentrates energy in predictable methods. The roughly 1.4 million kilometers of submarine cable presently in service symbolize one of many largest infrastructure investments in human historical past, and the entities that management this infrastructure train a type of energy that’s tough to overstate. They decide, on the most simple degree, who can take part within the world digital financial system and on what phrases.
Once I wrote concerning the infrastructure that makes upward mobility really feel unattainable, I used to be tracing how techniques are designed to look open whereas functioning as gates. Submarine cable possession is without doubt one of the clearest examples of this dynamic on the world scale. The web seems open and accessible. The infrastructure layer tells a distinct story: one among focus, extraction, and the persistence of colonial geography.
I’m not writing from a place of purity right here. I stay in some of the related cities on Earth, a metropolis whose connectivity is itself a product of the imperial geography I’m describing. Each article I publish, each name I make, travels by cables whose possession I’ve been documenting. My entry to the worldwide web, and the skilled benefits it offers, are direct advantages of a system that disadvantages billions of others.
What would a decolonized web really require?
Some countervailing efforts exist. The African Union has been pushing for larger African possession of submarine cable infrastructure, and initiatives just like the Pakistan & East Africa Connecting Europe (PEACE) cable symbolize Chinese language-backed options to the traditionally Western-dominated cable panorama. However different possession doesn’t routinely imply equitable possession. China’s investments in submarine cable infrastructure throughout the International South carry their very own geopolitical implications, and the structural dynamic of exterior possession stays largely intact.
A genuinely decolonized web infrastructure would require one thing extra radical than altering which nice energy owns the cables. It will require rethinking the directional logic of connectivity itself: constructing lateral connections between International South areas moderately than routing the whole lot by Northern hubs, establishing shared governance fashions for vital infrastructure, and treating submarine cables as one thing nearer to a public utility than a non-public asset. The Worldwide Telecommunication Union has made gestures on this route, however the momentum is overwhelmingly shifting the opposite means, towards larger personal focus.
The rise of the Center East as a significant marketplace for digital infrastructure might, in concept, present a mannequin for the way areas can leverage financial energy to reshape connectivity on their very own phrases. The UAE and Saudi Arabia are investing closely in changing into regional knowledge hubs, and their willingness to fund cable initiatives with important sovereign possession stakes is notable. However even this dynamic reinforces a broader level: the flexibility to form your individual digital infrastructure correlates virtually completely with current wealth and geopolitical energy. The nations that almost all want equitable connectivity are those least in a position to demand it.
As I explored in my investigation into the worldwide digital ID infrastructure being constructed with out democratic enter, the techniques that may outline the subsequent century of human life are being designed and deployed by actors with no democratic mandate and minimal accountability. Submarine cables are the bodily basis of these techniques. The map of who owns them is a map of who holds energy within the digital century. And that map, as I’ve spent months confirming, appears virtually precisely just like the one drawn by empires 2 hundred years in the past.
The following time somebody tells you the web is democratizing the world, ask them a easy query: who owns the cable?
Characteristic picture by Brett Sayles on Pexels
