Tag Archives: Facebook internet cable

Conquering Virgin Digital Lands a Cable at a Time

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Facebook  said it would back two new underwater cable projects—one in Africa and another in Asia in collaboration with Alphabet — that aim to give the Silicon Valley giants greater control of the global internet infrastructure that their businesses rely on.

The 2Africa project, a partnership between Facebook and several international telecom operators, said that it would add four new branches: the Seychelles, Comoro Islands, Angola and Nigeria. The project’s overall plan calls for 35 landings in 26 countries, with the goal of building an underwater ring of fiber-optic cables around Africa. It aims to begin operating in 2023… Separately, Facebook that it would participate in a 7,500-mile-long underwater cable system in Asia, called Apricot, that would connect Japan, Taiwan, Guam, the Philippines, Indonesia and Singapore. Google said that it would also join the initiative, which is scheduled to go live in 2024.

Driving the investments are costs and control. More than 400 commercially operated underwater cables, also known as submarine cables, carry almost all international voice and data traffic, making them critical for the economies and national security of most countries…Telecom companies own and operate many of these cables, charging fees to businesses that use them to ferry data. Facebook and Google used so much bandwidth that they decided about a decade ago that it would make sense to cut out the middleman and own some infrastructure directly.

Excerpts from Stu Woo, Facebook Backs Underwater Cable Projects to Boost Internet Connectivity, WSJ, Aug. 17, 2021

Facebook Mobs and Facebook Profits

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A Facebook team had a blunt message for senior executives. The company’s algorithms weren’t bringing people together. They were driving people apart. “Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” read a slide from a 2018 presentation. “If left unchecked,” it warned, Facebook would feed users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.”

That presentation went to the heart of a question dogging Facebook almost since its founding: Does its platform aggravate polarization and tribal behavior?  The answer it found, in some cases, was yes.  Facebook had kicked off an internal effort to understand how its platform shaped user behavior and how the company might address potential harms… 

But in the end, Facebook’s interest was fleeting. Mr. Zuckerberg and other senior executives largely shelved the basic research, according to previously unreported internal documents and people familiar with the effort, and weakened or blocked efforts to apply its conclusions to Facebook products…

An idea [proposed by those who wanted to reduce polarization at Facebook] was to tweak recommendation algorithms to suggest a wider range of Facebook groups than people would ordinarily encounter.  Building these features and combating polarization could have come, though, at the cost of lower engagement and it was “antigrowth” [meaning less profits for Facebook].

Excerpt from Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman, Facebook Executives Shut Down Efforts to Make the Site Less Divisive, WSJ, May 26, 2020

A Nasty Divorce: US-China Internet Cables

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United States officials granted Google permission to turn on a high-speed internet link to Taiwan but not to the Chinese territory of Hong Kong, citing national-security concerns in a ruling that underscores fraying ties between Washington and Beijing.“There is a significant risk that the grant of a direct cable connection between the United States and Hong Kong would “pose an unacceptable risk to the national security and law enforcement interests of the United States,” the U.S. Department of Justice said in its decision, which was backed by the departments of Homeland Security and Defense. The agencies instead urged the Federal Communications Commission to grant Google owner Alphabet  permission to start using the portion of its 8,000-mile underwater Pacific Light cable that connects California to Taiwan. .

The decision threatens to end Hong Kong’s dominance as a top destination for U.S. internet cables and puts at risk several ongoing projects, including a Facebook backed fiber-optic line linking Los Angeles to Hong Kong and a Google-backed project linking Hong Kong to the U.S. territory of Guam.

Washington is turning to the self-ruling island of Taiwan, which the U.S. supports with arms sales and unofficial political ties despite Beijing’s claims that it is part of China. U.S. officials are also considering alternatives such as Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Google and Facebook originally teamed up to build Pacific Light to Hong Kong in 2016, continuing the Silicon Valley giants’ long-term strategy to take more control of the network pipes that connect their data centers. The web companies and their Chinese investment partners kept building the cable even as U.S. authorities withheld the regulatory approvals they needed to start using it.

Major international data projects are subject to review by Team Telecom, a coalition of federal agencies with national-security oversight. The panel has taken a hard line against China in recent years. Team Telecom in 2018 recommended for the first time the denial of a Chinese application—that of China Mobile —to provide telecom services through U.S. networks, citing national-security and law-enforcement concerns.

President Trump on April 4 2020 signed an executive order that puts the attorney general in charge of overseeing Team Telecom and gives the panel direct authority to review existing licenses to provide such services, including those issued earlier to Chinese state-owned operators China Telecom and China Unicom.

Excerpts from Drew FitzGerald and Kate O’Keeffe, U.S. Allows Google Internet Project to Advance Only if Hong Kong Is Cut Out, WSJ, Apr. 9, 2020

Internet Cables and US Security

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A real-estate magnate is financing Google’s and Facebook Inc.’s new trans-Pacific internet cable, the first such project that will be majority-owned by a single Chinese company.  Wei Junkang, 56, is the main financier of the cable between Los Angeles and Hong Kong, a reflection of growing interest from China’s investors in high-tech industries.   It will be the world’s highest-capacity internet link between Asia and the U.S.

For Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook, the undersea cable provides a new data highway to the booming market in Southeast Asia. Google and Facebook, which are blocked in China but seeking ways back in, declined to comment on market possibilities in China. Google said the project, called the Pacific Light Cable Network, will be its sixth cable investment and will help it provide faster service to Asian customers…

Backers hope to have Pacific Light operating in late 2018. The elder Mr. Wei’s company, Pacific Light Data Communication Co., will own 60%, Eric Wei said, and Google and Facebook will each own 20%. The project cost is estimated at $500 million, and the Chinese company hired U.S. contractor TE SubCom to manufacture and lay the 17-millimeter wide, 7,954-mile long cable…

The cable project requires U.S. government approval, including a landing license from the Federal Communications Commission and a review by Team Telecom, a committee of officials from the departments of defense, homeland security and justice….

Pacific Light will likely face higher scrutiny from Team Telecom due to the controlling interest by a foreign investor, said Bruce McConnell, global vice president of the EastWest Institute and a former senior cybersecurity official with the Department of Homeland Security.

Team Telecom rarely rejects a landing license application, Mr. McConnell said, but cable operators must agree to security terms.“The agreement is usually heavily conditioned to ensure that (U.S.) security concerns are met,” he said.

The terms often require an American operator of the cable to assist U.S. authorities in legal electronic surveillance, including alerting regulators if foreign governments are believed to have accessed domestic data, according to copies of agreements filed with the FCC. The U.S. landing party usually must also be able to cut off U.S. data from the international network if asked…

More than 99% of the world’s internet and phone communications rely on fiber-optic cables crisscrossing continents and ocean floors. That makes these cables critical infrastructure to governments and a target for espionage.

One of the Eric Wei’s businesses is a Chinese alternative to the QR code called a D9 code, which the company promotes as a “safe” alternative to foreign technology.

Excerpts from  China Firm Backs Asia-US Cable, Wall Street Journal, Mar. 16, 2017