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Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon Are Quietly Buying Undersea Cables (venturebeat.com)
The internet is commonly described as a cloud, writes the consumer policy expert and editor at BroadbandNow, but "In reality, it's a series of wet, fragile tubes, and Google is about to own an alarming number of them."
An anonymous reader quotes VentureBeat: Google makes billions from its cloud platform. Now it's using those billions to buy up the internet itself -- or at least the submarine cables that make up the internet backbone. In February, the company announced its intention to move forward with the development of the Curie cable, a new undersea line stretching from California to Chile. It will be the first private intercontinental cable ever built by a major non-telecom company. And if you step back and just look at intracontinental cables, Google has fully financed a number of those already; it was one of the first companies to build a fully private submarine line.
Google isn't alone. Historically, cables have been owned by groups of private companies -- mostly telecom providers -- but 2016 saw the start of a massive submarine cable boom, and this time, the buyers are content providers. Corporations like Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon all seem to share Google's aspirations for bottom-of-the-ocean dominance... We're reaching the next stage of internet maturity; one where only large, incumbent players can truly win in media....
I've been watching this trend develop, being in the broadband space myself, and the recent movements are certainly concerning. Big tech's ownership of the internet backbone will have far-reaching, yet familiar, implications. It's the same old consumer tradeoff; more convenience for less control -- and less privacy... As we look to the future, we need to start asking ourselves what the internet is really going to look like whenever the content services that already command so much of our attention are in control of the internet backbone as well.
"Consumers will soon need to decide exactly how much faith they want to place in these companies to build out the internet of tomorrow."
An anonymous reader quotes VentureBeat: Google makes billions from its cloud platform. Now it's using those billions to buy up the internet itself -- or at least the submarine cables that make up the internet backbone. In February, the company announced its intention to move forward with the development of the Curie cable, a new undersea line stretching from California to Chile. It will be the first private intercontinental cable ever built by a major non-telecom company. And if you step back and just look at intracontinental cables, Google has fully financed a number of those already; it was one of the first companies to build a fully private submarine line.
Google isn't alone. Historically, cables have been owned by groups of private companies -- mostly telecom providers -- but 2016 saw the start of a massive submarine cable boom, and this time, the buyers are content providers. Corporations like Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon all seem to share Google's aspirations for bottom-of-the-ocean dominance... We're reaching the next stage of internet maturity; one where only large, incumbent players can truly win in media....
I've been watching this trend develop, being in the broadband space myself, and the recent movements are certainly concerning. Big tech's ownership of the internet backbone will have far-reaching, yet familiar, implications. It's the same old consumer tradeoff; more convenience for less control -- and less privacy... As we look to the future, we need to start asking ourselves what the internet is really going to look like whenever the content services that already command so much of our attention are in control of the internet backbone as well.
"Consumers will soon need to decide exactly how much faith they want to place in these companies to build out the internet of tomorrow."
Consumers will soon need to decide exactly how much faith they want to place in these companies to build out the internet of tomorrow.
What if a consumer doesn't have faith ? What options are there to stop this ?
The Net Neutrality push and pushback has made the giants very aware how vulnerable they are to the gatekeepers. You bitch and whine about the FCC and American telecom policies, but that's all above board adn clean compared to telecom in Asia and South America.
The slant of the headline and the lede paragraph imply that Google (and others) are “buying up” the existing undersea cabling... but what they are actually doing is laying their own new cable.
And this particular new cable brings the number of undersea cables owned by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon to a grand total of...
(Drumroll please)
One.
There are plenty of real reasons to hate on these companies. We don’t need to find made-up reasons for doing so.
#DeleteChrome
Now they own the pipe, and that makes a big difference. It's up to us to make sure access is not restricted by content.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
the amount of money it takes to do these projects means you're options are big companies or the government. I'd personally rather see the government doing it. Telecom is too valuable to leave in the hands of private companies that may not (ok, let's be honest, probably not) have the best interests of consumers at heart.
This does require a voting public to be engaged. I think that's doable but we need to get more emphasis on economic issues like this and less on social & wedge issues.
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Of course, quietly. A market with few players doen't need any shouting.
It is nothing but a bunch of tubes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If Google were buying up existing cables, I would be worried. But Google laying NEW submarine cables can only be for the good, because there aren't enough.
And some redundancy in cables is DEFINITELY a good thing.
Life will be much better behind the GoogWall(tm), just ask all the Chinese slaves behind theirs! Or, maybe not.
Google stopped the deployment of Fiber to the Home due to the costs of making it happen.
I can't help but think that deploying an undersea cable would be quite the financial undertaking as well.
That got me thinking about why Google would be interested in such things, but the answer came rather quickly.
Considering the amount of traffic that cable would be carrying ( likely all routed through Google owned hardware ) it's a treasure trove for any Company who partakes in the " Big Data " business model of knowing anything and everything about everyone.
Why settle on a per area basis ( regional fiber deployments ) when you can own the backbone that feeds an entire country ?
As if people have faith in Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon.
Reduced what in the what now?
This is an "article" written by an astroturfing lobbyist. His ideology sells the belief that deregulation solves all problems, yet because he is beholden to his telecom masters, he must also sell the belief that having more competition is also bad.
Someone call Neal Stephenson.
Otherwise, we'd need separate communications cables to support every different service provider, which would not only be wasteful but would impact the environment.
Oh, wait...
Pasword
It's not really a threat to privacy or security if you have an ounce of either, though, is it?
You're encrypting your traffic, right?
Then one of the primary facets of all modern encryption is that an adversary can read EVERY SINGLE PACKET you send and still be none the wiser as to what you were doing.
If you're properly routing your traffic, encrypting your DNS, etc. etc. then it doesn't matter if Putin himself is delivering the packets.
There may be net-neutrality issues, but there shouldn't be any security issues whatsoever. You should be able to publish your encrypted sessions on the ten o'clock news or in a newspaper... it literally makes no difference to whether or not your data was secure or not.
That's what the internet needs. Technology built on atheism.
They aren't doing this in secret, nor is this even recent news. It's not even recent on /. It was posted here in 2017
The internet is commonly described as a cloud, writes the consumer policy expert and editor at BroadbandNow, but "In reality, it's a series of wet, fragile tubes
I guess this genius was just ahead of his time.
Shame on you, those that laughed at him out of ignorance. Revere him as the god-like intelligence that resides on a plane of thought you cannot even comprehend.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The issue is that the current pricing is high enough such that the large consumers of undersea transit (the tech giants) see that they can save billions by not paying someone else to run the tubes. Undersea cables are very expensive to install and maintain, but long term the tech giants see the savings to be good for their bottom line, at least to some locations either under-served, or over-priced.
In actuality the existence of these undersea cables, and the willingness for the tech giants to build their own if they see a business case, will likely make the prices from the more entrenched providers go down due to the competition, or the threat of competition. So the more competition the better!
Only try and stake out somewhere for yourself and likeminded individuals where these cables don't currently treat and begin building out your own independent infrastructure towards the eventual goal of allowing an undoubtedly smaller internet more akin to the 1990s one to support what is left of the 'free minds' of the world. Because the fact is, most people's minds are shackled even more tightly today than many slaves are/were until chattel rules and physical bondage. The true lie about the abolishment was slavery was in ignoring the mental aspects of it and the hows and whys of marginalizing the slaves (also the indentured, at least prior to the formalization of slavery in America, which was the concession for eliminating indentured servitude of poor 'nice god fearing christians from europe, who had previously been manipulated into staying indentured far past their contracted times, much as the 'company store' did it later in mining towns.)
If enough people band together we can have an independent place of our own, at least for a time, but until and unless we stage out both terrestrial borders on the Earth, and extraterrestrial claims in space, before the corporations or current governments take it for themselves, we will simply be kicking the can of future servitude to our children.
we pretty well get pounded in the skull with the idea that government is bad from grade school on. One of the big states (Texas) has it's school boards controlled by right wing extremists and because it's such a large market they've been able to control the contents of schoolbooks for decades. Anti-government sentiment is all over our media too. The main narrative you see over here is "Gov't can't do anything right, they just make things worse". It's mostly pushed on us by big corps that don't want to pay taxes, but it works.
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All companies eventually die. What happens to these cables when that happens? Do they simply go dead and the Internet as a whole suffers?
What is the author talking about? What control have I ever had about which undersea cable my packet happened to traverse? Its not like Google is putting 'mom and pop' undersea cables out of business! This article seems like it was written by a bot, it uses a bunch of anti-business tropes which don't make sense in this context.
Big data builds -- or partners in -- new cables to mirror their cloud computing centers around the world. More than half the traffic carried by transoceanic submarine cables is between big data centers, not to people using the Net.
The government takes away our weapons as our enemies build our prisons. Slaves never remember their history.
Of course it is. If the primary cable is damaged, telcos or the government will be able to lease bandwidth on Google's cables.
What could go wrong?
You have never lied, never linked to sites that contradict your claims, never even once have you pulled numbers from your ass.
We wish the whole internet was like you.
Regulators? Anyone?
So the owners of this cable can't route their information over the other existing cables if needed? If so, it's still redundancy for them, and they represent a significant percentage of the data flowing between countries.
They can't even run fiber to my house. ;(