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

[Eric Tykwinski]

If you are looking for a good Fiber map, Mehmet Akcin from Infrapedia has posted this resource that’s free to use.

https://www.infrapedia.com/app

 

It does require a free login, but it’s a good resource to find connectivity globally.

If it doesn’t show the owner, you can usually just search for the fiber name to find it.

 

From: LT [mailto:lt-bounces at lists.liberationtech.org] On Behalf Of Yosem Companys
Sent: Wednesday, July 08, 2020 1:56 PM
To: LT
Subject: [liberationtech] NYT tech journalist Shira Ovide on how taking care of boring stuff has made tech giants indispensable to the Internet

 

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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