How the World Got Wired · Ships and Sharks

Who Owns It

For most of the history of undersea cables, they were owned by telephone companies — usually in groups, with telecoms from different countries chipping in together to build a cable that all of them would share. A cable across the Pacific might be owned in part by AT&T, in part by Japan’s NTT, in part by Australia’s Telstra. This is called a consortium.

That has changed, and the change has happened mostly in the last ten or fifteen years.

The change is this: a few enormous American companies — the ones you have probably heard of, the ones whose names you say without thinking, Google and Meta and Microsoft and Amazon — now lay their own cables. They don’t share them. They don’t ask telecom companies for permission. They build them, they own them, they run them.

The reason is simple. These companies move so much information through the world’s networks that no telecom can sell them enough capacity. Every video on YouTube, every Facebook photo, every Microsoft cloud customer’s data, every Amazon order — multiplied by billions of users, every day — requires cables of a size that nobody had imagined twenty years ago. So the companies have started building their own.

A cable called Marea, finished in 2018, runs along the seafloor from Virginia to Spain. It is owned by Meta (the company that owns Facebook) and Microsoft, with help from a Spanish telecom. A cable called Dunant, finished in 2021, runs from Virginia to France. It is owned by Google. A new system called Apricot is being built right now to connect Vietnam, the Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia, Japan, and Guam, mostly funded by Meta and Google. A truly enormous cable called 2Africa — about 45,000 kilometers long, connecting more than thirty countries around the entire continent of Africa — is owned by a group led by Meta.

Think about this for a moment. If your grandmother sends a video from Vietnam to you in another country, there is a real chance that every part of its undersea journey takes place on a cable owned by an American technology company. Not by Vietnam. Not by the country you live in. By a private corporation, based in California, that most people only know as “the company that runs Facebook” or “the company that runs Google.”

This is one of the quiet revolutions of our time. The physical infrastructure of global communication, which used to be owned by governments and national telecoms, is increasingly owned by a small number of American firms. Whether this is good or bad is the kind of question your generation is going to have to answer.

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