Google which makes over 97% of its revenue from advertisements, has over the last five years been rapidly expanding into the cloud computing business. Google’s advertisements are doing so well it has billions of cash tucked away for it to make bold business ventures into new areas i.e. buying up the underlying infrastructure for the future of the internet.
In February 2019, the company announced its plans to move forward with the Curie cable, the latest undersea line stretching from California to Chile. This will be the first private intercontinental cable ever built by a non-telecom company.
Google isn’t the only non-telecom company with plans for owning the internet. Historically, the internets cables have been owned by groups of large private telecom providers but 2016 saw the start of a giant submarine cable boom, and this time, the buyers are content providers. The likes of Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon all seem to share Google’s thirst for internet infrastructure dominance.
Consumers will soon need to decide exactly how much faith they want to place in these companies which will providing content, services and transport of the entire internets service. Some of these companies business models are purely to harvest our data and sell to the highest bidder.