Samanth Subramanian

In return, we get this much bandwidth and we can kind of sell that on to our customers.

And so these companies would form essentially like a consortium.

And that was the consortium model was popular for a very long time.

And in the 1990s and the early 2000s, you saw this wave of privatization around the world.

all of these telecom companies were hived off into private companies.

And suddenly, at the same time, there was also this growth of the investor-led model.

Like an investor would say, this cable looks like a good business idea.

I will go out and raise money.

And then I will come back to these telecom companies and say, look, I'm willing to lay this cable.

How much bandwidth do you want to buy from me?

And they would kind of apportion bandwidth in that way.

And so that model prevailed for like much of the 2000s.

And I think it's only about

seven or eight years ago, that big tech companies, by which I mean Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft, A, grew so cash rich that they could afford these cables.

So for example, a transatlantic cable now from London to New York would cost about $500 million.

which is a lot of money still for you and me, but maybe not that much for Google.

And so they started to fund these cables because rightly or wrongly, they thought, look, data is the lifeblood of our business and it makes more sense to build this infrastructure ourselves.

And so now we got to the stage, or when I was researching this book, it got to a stage where two out of every three new cables were being funded and owned either in part or in full by one of these four tech companies.

And that has enormous sort of implications for data privacy, data security.

I mean, sort of who controls your data, but also like who controls who gets the internet.