Who owns internet pipes

Some mobile phone operators also offer sophisticated payment capabilities, allowing people who don't have access to the conventional banking system to make electronic payments. A few wealthy countries, including Japan, South Korea, and Sweden, that have more mobile internet subscriptions than people. Some customers have two more or smartphones, tablets, or other connected mobile devices. Internet access is a lot faster in some places than others. According to Speedtest. The United States clocks in at number 30, with average speeds of 24 Mbps.

These figures are worth taking with a grain of salt because they're based on a self-selected sample. Users must visit the speedtest. Still, the data permits interesting cross-country comparisons. For the internet to work, everyone needs a unique Internet Protocol IP address. To coordinate the distribution of these addresses, the internet is broken up into five zones. Each zone has been assigned hundreds of millions of IP addresses to manage.

Unfortunately, the original internet architecture, called IPv4, only allows for about 4 billion addresses, and the network has nearly exhausted the supply. The problem is particularly growing in fast-growing regions like Asia. Engineers have developed a long-run solution to this problem: switching to a new internet standard called IPv6.

IPv6 offers such a large number of potential addresses that the world will never run out. But adoption of IPv6 has been slow. Today, the overwhelming majority of internet traffic uses the old standard. But with few IPv4 addresses left, people joining the internet in the future will have little choice but to use IPv6. IP addresses have a numeric format like this: But it's easier for people to remember domain names such as vox.

The domain name system DNS acts like a directory system, telling computers wanting to view a website like www. The system is hierarchical: the. Domains like. But other countries are more likely to use what's known as country-code top level domains ccTLD. Every country in the world has a ccTLD.

This map shows the ccTLDs in Europe. Even very small countries get ccTLDs. Here's a close-up of the area around Australia and the many small island nations that have their own domain names.

Some of these countries realized that they could make a lot of money if they opened their domains to foreigners. The result: popular websites like last. Today the fastest way to transmit information over long distances is with fiber optics — long, thin strands of glass that carry information as pulses of light. Because a single fiber can transmit as much as billion bits per second Gbps, about ten thousand times faster than a typical home broadband connection and a cable can contain hundreds of fibers, a single cable can have enough capacity for the communications of millions of users.

All that data has proven irresistible to the National Security Agency, which has developed a variety of techniques to scoop up data as it flows through fiber optic cables. Fiber optic cables are relatively fragile.

In , two fiber optic cables that connect Middle Eastern countries to India were cut, leading to disruptions for many internet users in Egypt and India. Some press reports suggested that the damage was caused by a ship's anchor being dragged along the bottom of the Mediterranean, but the Egyptian authorities have said no ships were in the area at the time the cables were damaged.

The exact cause of the outage remains a mystery. Sometimes internet access is disrupted due to accidents. In other cases, it's deliberate government policy. For example, during the Tahrir Square protests, the Egyptian government cut off Egypt's connections to the rest of the internet. This was possible because Egypt's links to the outside world were controlled by a handful of large companies.

This map shows which countries have few enough links to the outside world to be at risk of this kind of censorship. Some countries, such as the United States, have dozens of links to the outside world, making a coordinated shutdown of the US internet almost impossible.

Others have many fewer links and are correspondingly more vulnerable to censorship. In April , Syria's largest city, Aleppo, disappeared from the internet for several hours, one of several outages that have occurred during the civil war there.

The southern parts of Syria receive internet access from undersea fiber optic cables, but Aleppo accesses the internet via a land connection to Turkey. It's not clear if the outage was due to accidental damage from fighting in the area, or whether the regime of Bashar al-Assad had deliberately disrupted rebel-held Aleppo's internet access. As the Washington Post's Andrea Peterson puts it , "Internet outages in Syria have a curious history of happening at times convenient for the Assad regime.

Zakir Durumeric, Eric Wustrow, and J. Alex Halderman. When Superstorm Sandy hit New Jersey in October , it knocked a number of computers off the internet. A team of computer scientists at the University of Michigan had recently built ZMap , a tool that allowed them to scan every computer on the internet in less than an hour. That allowed them to make this map, which shows locations where the number of web servers running the SSL encryption software declined by 30 percent or more, which turns out to be a good proxy for heavy storm damage.

Freedom House. In most Western countries, the internet is a free-speech zone where ordinary people can express themselves without fear of censorship. But that's not true everywhere. This map from Freedom House details which countries respect freedom of speech and which countries flout it.

Cuba and several countries in Southeast Asia and the Middle East engage in pervasive censorship and are marked in purple.

China, for example, has a "great firewall" that makes it difficult for its citizens to read about sensitive topics such as the Falun Gong or the Tiananmen Square massacre. Other countries have a partially free internet. In Russia, for example, the government has engaged in more aggressive internet censorship since Vladimir Putin returned to power in Mother Jones.

The social media sites Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are frequent targets for censorious governments. This map from Mother Jones shows which countries restrict their users from accessing these sites. China doesn't just block access to Western social media sites, it has also cultivated home-grown alternatives that are under the thumb of the Chinese authorities. These social media sites enable users to engage in relatively unfettered discusion, but the providers are required to participate in an elaborate monitoring and censorship regime to ensure that sensitive topics do not receive widespread discussion.

The privatization of the internet transformed what had been an obscure academic network into a hotbed of commercial innovation. In the late s, hundreds of new companies sprouted up to take advantage of these opportunities. And many of them were clustered in Silicon Valley, a strip of land on the peninsula south of San Francisco. In the mids, Silicon Valley was already home to established technology companies like Intel, Apple, Adobe, and Cisco.

The dot-com boom brought a new crop of companies, including Yahoo, eBay, and Google. Since the turn of the century, newer companies such as Facebook and Nest have been founded in Silicon Valley too. Mozilla, the non-profit organizaiton behind the popular Firefox browser, is based in Mountain View, not far from Google.

We use "Silicon Valley" as a shorthand for the technology companies in the San Francisco Bay Area, but the moniker is becoming increasingly out of date. Since , a growing share of internet startups are being formed not in suburbs like Mountain View or Palo Alto but in the heart of San Francisco. Twitter, Dropbox, Yelp, and Airbnb are all successful technology companies that have been founded in the last decade. And they're all located within a couple of miles of one another in a San Francisco neighborhood called Soma for South of Market.

The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, founded in to manage Wikipedia, is also located here. One big reason this neighborhood has emerged as San Francisco's innovatin center is its proximity to the Caltrain station at 4th and King Streets. The station provides easy access to the venture capitalists and established companies at the other end of the Caltrain line in Silicon Valley. For the first decade of the 21st century, the internet was dominated by Microsoft Internet Explorer.

In , the software was the most popular way to browse the web in most countries, with Firefox popular in some parts of Eastern Europe and Asia. In this context, physical ownership of undersea infrastructure to mitigate the risk of surveillance is emerging as an investment motivation. Still, the rapid expansion of the submarine cable network in the last decade was largely fueled by the meteoric increase in demand for internet services. For videos to play and links to open milliseconds after a click, with minimal latency, content needs to be cached as close as possible to users.

So companies like Facebook and Google began to build global networks of data centers. To connect those data centers, they not only invest in existing cables, but also increasingly build their own cables to ensure that their services are quickly and readily available anywhere in the world.

At a time when there is already significant concern about the consolidation of power by the biggest technology companies in multiple realms, and telcos are merging with traditional media companies, it raises questions about who literally controls the internet, and how we wish to see it develop in the future.

When the same companies own the online platforms and the infrastructure to access them, we have to consider whether the incentives and agreements for sharing access to cables thus far will still make sense. With so many aspects of our societies and economies relying on the internet — and the undersea cables that power it — we can and should demand that the public has a say in the regulation of this critical infrastructure. Pero no todos, […]. I wish we could go back in time.

To before all this hyper connectivity. I remeber life being a whole lot better then. This is the kind of stuff that asks for breaking up these companies. They should be separate companies handling these tasks. I have known about the underwater cables.

I didn't know Google had that many cables and plans to add more, but it makes sense. That is pretty scary because we know that Google is manipulating searches and censoring information. They are actually two protocols, transport control protocol and internet protocol that set up connections between computers, insuring that the connections are reliable and formating messages into packets.

Backbone ISPs connect their networks at peering points, neutrally owned locations with high-speed switches and routers that move traffic among the peers. These are often owned by third parties, sometimes non-profits, that facilitate unifying the backbone. Such agreements eliminate potential financial disputes that might have the result of slowing down internet performance. The internet backbone is made up of the fastest routers, which can deliver Gbps trunk speeds.

These routers are made by vendors including Cisco, Extreme, Huawei, Juniper, and Nokia, and use the border gateway protocol BGP to route traffic among themselves. Tier 3 providers provide businesses and consumers with access to the internet. These providers have no access of their own to the internet backbone, so on their own would not be able to connect their customers to all of the billions of internet-attached computers.

Buying access to Tier 1 providers is expensive. So often Tier 3 ISPs contract with Tier 2 regional ISPs that have their own networks that can deliver traffic to a limited geographic area but not to all internet-attached devices.