[liberationtech] NYT tech journalist Shira Ovide on how taking care of boring stuff has made tech giants indispensable to the Internet

[Yosem Companys]

July 8, 2020

The tech giants’ invisible helpers

By Shira Ovide

My friends, I vow to make you care about internet cables and metal poles in
the ground. Please don’t immediately unsubscribe from this newsletter.

The magic of the internet requires a lot of very boring stuff behind the
scenes. We wouldn’t be able to watch kitten videos on YouTube without an
elaborate system of hulking warehouses lined with computer equipment, thick
coils of wire that spans oceans and tree-size poles laced with internet
cables.

We mostly never see or think about this stuff. But one of the
underappreciated ways that today’s technology superpowers like Google and
Amazon stay superpowers is their mastery of all the boring stuff that makes
the internet possible. This is the kind of advantage the tech superpowers
have that is hard for governments to break apart or for rivals to compete
with.

The tech giants’ fingerprints, brain power and dollars are all over the
invisible backbone of the global internet.

Facebook on Monday talked about undersea internet pipelines it is helping
fund in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and other global spots to help
improve online access and speeds. My colleague Abdi Latif Dahir wrote this
week about Google’s first use of high-altitude balloons to transmit the
internet in areas of Kenya.

Google’s internet balloons — like Facebook’s failed attempt at
internet-beaming drones — might be pointlessly showy pieces of equipment
where conventional cellphone towers are better suited. But no matter. This
is the relatively glamorous tip of an otherwise boring iceberg.

Google, Facebook, Amazon and other big American tech companies collectively
spend tens of billions of dollars each year on things like massive
warehouses of computer and internet equipment that let them speed along
your Instagram posts and home shopping purchases.

You might have driven by some of these computing centers and never noticed
them. But the tech giants’ efforts to make these boring workhorses more
efficient and effective is one of the most important advancements in
technology in the last decade.

It doesn’t stop there. Increasingly lining the world’s oceans are undersea
cables that are partly or entirely funded by internet companies and are
essential cogs in the internet. And there are even way more boring projects
like software that Facebook helped design for Wi-Fi hot spots tailored to
the demands of places like rural Kenya where internet connections are
spotty.

The internet powers aren’t doing this for selfless reasons. They know that
if they help improve the world’s internet-carrying backbone, we are likely
to spend more time Googling, watching YouTube kittens and pinging friends
on WhatsApp.

Few other companies can afford to build undersea internet cables, have the
same level of skill in running data centers, or care so much about the
internet’s boring backbone. Little companies and all us kitten lovers
benefit from the tech superpowers’ mastery over the online plumbing, but
the giants benefit more. In some cases, the pipes they’re building carry
their digital traffic alone.

We tend to focus on tech companies’ dominance over parts of the internet we
can see, like search engines and social media sites. But the superpowers’
command of the invisible infrastructure of the digital world gives them an
untouchable advantage. The boring stuff turns out to be incredibly
important.
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