Samanth Subramanian

Well, there's a considerable amount of redundancy built in, because I think the deal here is this.

Even if Google owns, for example, one transatlantic cable, and even if it, let's assume, hypothetically, it funnels only Google-based data through that cable.

So let's assume it funnels Gmail and Google Meets and all this other stuff.

Only Google data is going through that cable.

This never happens, but we'll let it ride for now.

It is in Google's best interests to buy redundancy on another cable because that cable might go down.

And in a similar way, it is in Meta's best interest to buy redundancy on a Google cable just in case a Meta cable goes down.

So there's a lot of redundancy built into the system.

There's between 500 and 550.

undersea cables around the world.

Many of them are sort of clustered around these, not surprisingly, these big areas of economic activity.

So Western Europe to the eastern seaboard of the U.S., Southeast Asia, China and Southeast Asia, the Gulf and then India.

So these are heavily trafficked routes and there's a lot of cables that traffic them for the simple reason that redundancy is important.

We can think about the fact that every year, roughly 100 cables get cut around the world.

Most of these are accidents.

There might be a ship that throws its anchor overboard and cuts a cable by accident, or it might be that a fishing boat is trawling the seabed and it hooks a cable and snags it and cuts it.

So think about 100 cuts every year.

And yet we don't

experience nearly that order of internet outages, right?

And part of the reason is, of course, we have redundancy in the form of land cables, which I haven't really talked about in this book, but there's cables coming to the US from Canada and so on.