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Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon Are Quietly Buying Undersea Cables

Sunday April 7, 2019. 08:47 PM , from Slashdot
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.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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