Currents of control: Ownership evolutions in the submarine data cable industry

Abstract

The article examines global submarine data cable projects from 1989 to 2028 (N=804) to explore the evolving political economy of digital media and communication infrastructures. Focusing on the growing number of new cable projects and their ownership, we identify several phases of network expansion, which correspond with different types of market dominance and ownership constellations. In the early phases of submarine cable buildout, the main market actors were national and regional telecommunications corporations, often collaborating in large consortia, whereas the later phases see a growing concentration of ownership around a set of global market actors, often establishing their own networks to support their extensive platform and data businesses. In interpreting this development, we seek inspiration from previous historical analyses of large-scale technological systems and argue that the internet has reached a momentum where its built-in affordances lead to a fundamental shift in institutional power. We end by discussing the implications of this historical transformation, emphasizing that the new generations of cable systems amplify an already walled-off ecosystem, where access to the superior infrastructure is conditioned by the usage of proprietary services, leading to a reintegration of the network and service layer that the internet originally separated.