THE UNDERSEA CABLE WAR: Who Controls the Internet's Physical Infrastructure?
THE UNDERSEA CABLE WAR: Who Controls the Internet's Physical Infrastructure? Core thesis: The physical infrastructure of the internet is not controlled by governments. It is controlled by four American tech giants. Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon own or lease roughly 70 to 75 percent of the world's submarine cable bandwidth. Meanwhile, the cables that carry 99 percent of intercontinental data are becoming a new front in US-China geopolitical competition. This "cable war" is not about who lays the cables—it is about who decides where they go, where they land, and who is allowed to build them. --- HOOK 99 percent. That is the proportion of global intercontinental data traffic that passes through submarine cables. Emails, video calls, financial transactions, AI training data—all of it travels through fiber optic cables lying on the ocean floor. There are more than 600 active and planned submarine cables in the world, with a total length exceeding 1.5 million kilomet...