Self disclosure!
Until recently i thought the internet, was just a phone thing. I had no clue why some people got dial-up and others high speed. Thought people were just being frugal! Nor did i understand why CANARIE, Industry Canada, National Research Council and Bell where in such a tizzie about big fibre optic connections to universities and industrial zones. All that Connecting Canadians thing was more than community access points and recycled computers in community groups. Sheesh! Let alone did I know about switching, information routing and continental fibre power zones, or the geopolitics of laying cables, particularly transcontinental ones and submarine ones nor the massive business interests. Then there are server farms, the tremendous amounts of power they suck and data havens and still, I am not sure of all the mechanics or how it all really works! For instance, i was really amazed the other day when my computer broke but wireless still worked! I was just so darned happy to have made the discovery - dang they are not co-dependant. But honestly, who else can really tell you about all this stuff, or at least translate it into English from engineerglish.
And what about the next best kept secret! That the balance of power in the world is in the cables! Yup! You can cut off allot of banking, business and simple communication by just cutting those submarine cables! And who can afford to put a ship out to sea, do some deep sea diving equiped with special bolt cutters and not be noticed by satellite! You figure it out!
Excerpt from Cryptonomicon, pp.1042-1044
Randy and Avi are discussing cables in an electronic store in Akihabara:
"I don’t need to tell you how dependent we are on submarine cables," Avi says.
"We meaning the Crypt, or society in general?"
"Both. Obviously the Crypt can’t even function without communication linkages to the outside world. But the Internet and everything else are just as dependent on cables."
…
"So?"
"So, cables are vulnerable."
…
"Those cables used to be owned by PTAs. Which were basically just branches of governments. Hence they pretty much did what governments told them to. But the new cables going in today are owned and controlled by corporations beholden to no one except their investors. Puts certain governments in a position they don’t like very much."
"Okay," Randy says, "they used to have ultimate control over how information flowed between countries in that they ran the PTTs that ran the cables."
"Yes."
"Now they don’t."
"That’s right. There’s been this big transfer of power that has taken place under their noses, without their having foreseen it….And we’ve talked about many times, there are many reasons why different governments might want to control the flow of information. China might want to institute political censorship, whereas the U.S. might want to regulate electronic cash transfers so that they can keep collecting taxes. In the old days they could ultimately do this insofar as they owned the cables."
"But now they can’t" Randy says.
"Now they can’t, and this change happened very fast, or at least it looked fast to governments with its retarded intellectual metabolism, and now they are way behind the curve, and scared and pissed off, and starting to lash out."
"They are?"
"They are."
…
"Do you have any idea what down time on a state-of-the-art cable cost nowadays?"
"Of course I do," Randy says. "It can be hundreds of thousands of dollars a minute".
"That’s right. And it takes at least a couple of days to repair a broken cable. A couple of days. A single break in a cable can cost the companies that own it tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue."
"But that hasn’t been that much of an issue," Randy says. "The cables are plowed so deeply now. They’re only exposed in the deep ocean."
"Yes–Where only an entity with the naval resources of a major government could sever them."
"Oh, shit!"
"This is the new balance of power, Randy."
"You can’t seriously be telling me that governments are threatening to–"
"The Chinese have already done it. They cut an older cable–first-generation optical fiber–joining Korea to Nippon. The cable wasn’t that important–they only did it as a warning shot. And what’s the rule of thumb about governments cutting submarine cables?"
"That’s like nuclear war," Randy says. "Easy to start. Devastating in its results. So no one does it."
"But if the Chinese have cut a cable, the other governments with a vested interest in throttling information flow can say, ‘Hey, the Chinese did it, we need to show that we can retaliate in kind.’"
"Is that actually happening?"
"No, no, no! Avi says."
Avi later discusses how the world negotiates, the balance of power is mediated between those who run the navies - who can cut the cables and the people who own and operate the cables and how each side is afraid of what the other can do, and so they come to understandings and agreements and so on.
