The shift of cable ownership to content providers

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The structural change of the past fifteen years in who owns the physical internet. Until roughly 2010 international cables were built almost entirely by consortia of national and regional telecommunications carriers, each taking a share of capacity and selling it on; the traffic belonged to their customers and the cable was a wholesale asset. Since then the companies that generate and terminate the traffic — principally Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft — have become the dominant investors, first buying fibre pairs, then commissioning whole private systems. Published analyses put content providers' share of used international bandwidth at roughly two-thirds by the early 2020s and hyperscalers' share around three-quarters by the mid-2020s, and describe them as participating in a majority of planned new systems. The consequences run in two directions and both are real. Capacity has been built faster, on more diverse routes, than carrier consortia would have financed. And the physical layer of a shared global commons is increasingly owned by a small number of firms whose interests in where a cable goes are their own — which is a question about governance rather than about engineering, and is the reason cable ownership now appears in national security reviews.

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