• Meta reportedly planning dedicated undersea cable around the world.
• Stopovers in India and S. Africa, links East Coast US with West Coast.
• Net neutrality and content-favouring concerns.

Meta has plans to lay a new undersea cable that circles the world, linking East and West Coasts of the US by going East into the Atlantic, and from there around the globe.

The company’s plans for the so-called ‘W’ cable (so named due to its eventual shape when drawn on a map) will avoid areas that it considers high-risk, such as the South China Sea and the Straits of Singapore. There have been claims of deliberate sabotage of such communications infrastructure in certain areas that have taken place as part of local conflict escalation.

The project is said to cost in the region of $10 billion, and will likely take between five and ten years to complete. The project is thought to have a start date of next year at the earliest, meaning the new connection would come on line in 2030 in the most optimistic forecasts.

To ensure data consistency along the circuitous route, the company plans on the cable making landfall in South Africa, India and Australia, for power boosts and data restoration. According to Sunil Tagare, a respected industry figure who broke the story, the way-stations will represent significant opportunities in those countries, as they will be able to benefit from the low-latency firehose the cable represents.

India in particular stands to gain much, as the world’s largest user of Meta (née Facebook) it will have as direct an access as any country can have to Meta headquarters.

However, unlike previous infrastructure projects in which Meta has been involved, such as the 2Africa cable, the company will own the new cable outright rather than acting as part of a consortium involving ‘traditional’ telecommunications companies. Speculation is understandable, therefore, that Meta might prioritise its own data on the cable, and that of any companies it favours.

Threats to communications and net neutrality are not new. The US is currently the scene of much wrangling by ISPs that want to prioritise traffic of customers who pay higher rates than others and penalise users who send and receive ‘excessive’ amounts of data, despite paying for the ability to do just that. But a global interconnection takes any debate about prioritisation and net neutrality to a new level.

While there is a headline economic benefit to countries that host the way-points of large communications projects (and those that are at intercontinental terminations of connections), there is concern that technology giants are effectively acting as global-scale internet service providers with the intention of ensuring that more users get to consume more of the companies’ content, at the expense of everything else.

Claims of a ‘more connected world’ and ‘connectivity for humankind’ hark back to a time when companies like Google and Meta portrayed themselves (and initially acted) as nerdy, hippy-types with a vision of a digital future for every person on the globe. However, since all but the earliest days of the internet, the body of evidence that founders’ visions have long-since been abandoned is overwhelming. It’s unsurprising that speculation about the future of the internet is darkly-hued, given that its infrastructure is increasingly owned by the same companies that control much of its content.