Monthly Archives: May 2022

The U.K. government has confirmed it will move forward on a major ex ante competition reform aimed at Big Tech, as it set out its priorities for the new parliamentary session earlier today.

However it has only said that draft legislation will be published over this period booting the prospect of passing updated competition rules for digital giants further down the road.

At the same time today it confirmed that a data reform bill will be introduced in the current parliamentary session.

This follows a consultation it kicked off last year to look at how the U.K. might diverge from EU law in this area, post-Brexit, by making changes to domestic data protection rules.

There has been concern that the government is planning to water down citizens data protections. Details the government published today, setting out some broad-brush aims for the reform, dont offer a clear picture either way suggesting well have to wait to see the draft bill itself in the coming months.

Read on for an analysis of what we know about the U.K.s policy plans in these two key areas

The government has been teasing a major competition reform since the end of 2020 putting further meat on the bones of the plan last month, when it detailed a bundle of incoming consumer protection and competition reforms.

But today, in a speech setting out prime minister Boris Johnsons legislative plans for the new session at the state opening of parliament, it committed to publish measures to create new competition rules for digital markets and the largest digital firms; also saying it would publish draft legislation to promote competition, strengthen consumer rights and protect households and businesses.

In briefing notes to journalists published after the speech, the government said the largest and most powerful platform will face legally enforceable rules and obligations to ensure they cannot abuse their dominant positions at the expense of consumers and other businesses.

A new Big Tech regulator will also be empowered to proactively address the root causes of competition issues in digital markets via interventions to inject competition into the market, including obligations on tech firms to report new mergers and give consumers more choice and control over their data, it also said.

However another key detail from the speech specifies that the forthcoming Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Bill will only be put out in draft form over the parliament meaning the reform wont be speeding onto the statue books.

Instead, up to a year could be added to the timeframe for passing laws to empower the Digital Markets Unit (DMU) assuming ofc Johnsons government survives that long. The DMU was set up in shadow form last year but does not yet have legislative power to make the planned pro-competition interventions which policymakers intend to correct structural abuses by Big Tech.

(The governments Online Safety Bill, for example which was published in draft form in May 2021 wasnt introduced to parliament until March 2022; and remains at the committee stage of the scrutiny process, with likely many more months before final agreement is reached and the law passed. That bill was included in the 2022 Queens Speech so the governments intent continues to be to pass the wide-ranging content moderation legislation during this parliamentary session.)

The delay to introducing the competition reform means the government has cemented a position lagging the European Union which reached political agreement on its own ex ante competition reform in March. The EUs Digital Markets Act is slated to enter into force next Spring, by which time the U.K. may not even have a draft bill on the table yet. (While Germany passed an update to its competition law last year and has already designated Google and Meta as in scope of the ex ante rules.)

The U.K.s delay will be welcomed by tech giants, of course, as it provides another parliamentary cycle to lobby against an ex ante reboot thats intended to address competition and consumer harms in digital markets which are linked to giants with so-called Strategic Market Status.

This includes issues that the U.K.s antitrust regulator, the CMA, has already investigated and confirmed (such as Google and Facebooks anti-competitive dominance of online advertising); and others it suspects of harming consumers and hampering competition too (like Apple and Googles chokepoint hold over their mobile app stores).

Any action in the U.K. to address those market imbalances doesnt now look likely before 2024 or even later.

Recent press reports, meanwhile, have suggested Johnson may be going cold on the ex ante regime which will surely encourage Big Techs U.K. lobbyists to seize the opportunity to spread self-interested FUD in a bid to totally derail the plan.

The delay also means tech giants will have longer to argue against the U.K. introducing an Australian-style news bargaining code which the government appears to be considering for inclusion in the future regime.

One of the main benefits of the bill is listed as [emphasis ours]:

Ensuring that businesses across the economy that rely on very powerful tech firms, including the news publishing sector, are treated fairly and can succeed without having to comply with unfair terms.

The independent Cairncross Review in 2019 identified an imbalance of bargaining power between news publishers and digital platforms, the government also writes in its briefing note, citing a Competition and Markets Authority finding that publishers see Google and Facebook as must have partners as they provide almost 40 per cent of large publishers traffic.

Major consumer protection reforms which are planned in parallel with the ex ante regime including letting the CMA decide for itself when U.K. consumer law has been broken and fine violating platforms over issues like fake reviews, rather than having to take the slow route of litigating through the courts are also on ice until the bill gets passed. So major e-commerce and marketplace platforms will also have longer to avoid hard-hitting regulatory action for failures to purge bogus reviews from their U.K. sites.

Consumer rights group, Which?, welcomed the governments commitment to legislate to strengthen the U.K.s competition regime and beef up powers to clamp down on tech firms that breach consumer law. However it described it as disappointing that it will only publish a draft bill in this parliamentary session.

The government must urgently prioritise the progress of this draft Bill so as to bring forward a full Bill to enact these vital changes as soon as possible, added Rocio Concha, Which? director of policy and advocacy, in a statement.

In another major post-Brexit policy move, the government has been loudly flirting with ripping up protections for citizens data or, at least, killing off cookie banners.

Today it confirmed it will move forward with reforming the rules wrapping peoples data just without being clear about the exact changes it plans to make. So where exactly the U.K. is headed on data protection still isnt clear.

That said, in briefing notes on the forthcoming data reform bill, the government appears to be directing most focus at accelerating public sector data sharing instead of suggesting it will pass amendments that pave the way for unfettered commercial data-mining of web users.

Indeed, it claims that ensuring peoples personal data is protected to a gold standard is a core plank of the reform.

A section on the main benefits of the reform also notably lingers on public sector gains with the government writing that it will be making sure that data can be used to empower citizens and improve their lives, via more effective delivery of public healthcare, security, and government services.

But of course the devil will be in the detail of the legislation presented in the coming months.

Heres what else the government lists as the main elements of the upcoming data reform bill:

Discussing other main benefits for the reform, the government touts increased competitiveness and efficiencies for businesses, via a suggested reduction in compliance burdens (such as by creating a data protection framework that is focused on privacy outcomes rather than box ticking); a clearer regulatory environment for personal data use which it suggests will fuel responsible innovation and drive scientific progress; simplifying the rules around research to cement the U.K.s position as a science and technology superpower, as it couches it; and ensuring the data protection regulator (the ICO) takes appropriate action against organisations who breach data rights and that citizens have greater clarity on their rights.

The upshot of all these muscular-sounding claims boils down to whatever the government means by an outcomes-focused approach to data protection versus tick-box privacy compliance. (As well as what responsible innovation might imply.)

Its also worth mulling what the government means when it says it wants the ICO to take appropriate action against breaches of data rights. Given the U.K. regulator has been heavily criticized for inaction in key areas like adtechyou could interpret that as the government intending the regulator to take more enforcement over privacy breaches, not less.

(And its briefing note does list modernizing the ICO, as a purpose for the reform in order to [make] sure it has the capabilities and powers to take stronger action against organisations who breach data rules while requiring it to be more accountable to Parliament and the public.)

However, on the flip side, if the government really intends to water down Brits privacy rights by say, letting businesses overrule the need to obtain consent to mine peoples info via a more expansive legitimate interest regime for commercial entities to do what they like with data (something the government has been considering in the consultation) then the question is how that would square with a top-line claim for the reform ensuing U.K. citizens personal data is protected to a gold standard?

The overarching question here is whose gold standard the U.K. is intending to meet? Brexiters might scream for their own yellow streak but the reality is there are wider forces at play once youre talking about data exports.

Despite Johnsons governments fondness for Brexit freedom rhetoric, when it comes to data protection law the U.K.s hands are tied by the need to continue meeting the EUs privacy standards, which require the an equivalent level of protection for citizens data outside the bloc at least if the U.K. wants data to be able to flow freely into the country from the blocs ~447 million citizens, i.e., to all those U.K. businesses keen to sell digital services to Europeans.

This free flow of data is governed by a so-called adequacy decision which the European Commission granted the U.K. in June last year, essentially on account that no changes had (yet) been made to U.K. law since it adopted the blocs General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018 by incorporating it into U.K. law.

And the Commission simultaneously warned that any attempt by the U.K. to weaken domestic data protection rules and thereby degrade fundamental protections for EU citizens data exported to the U.K. would risk an intervention. Put simply, that means the EU could revoke adequacy requiring all EU-U.K. data flows to be assessed for legality on a case-by-case basis, vastly ramping up compliance costs for U.K. businesses wanting to import EU data.

Last years adequacy agreement also came with a baked in sunset clause of four years meaning it will be up for automatic review in 2025. Ergo, the amount of wiggle room the U.K. government has here is highly limited. Unless its truly intent on digging ever deeper into the lunatic sinkhole of Brexit by gutting this substantial and actually expanding sunlit upland of the economy (digital services).

The cost in pure compliance terms of the U.K. losing EU adequacy has been estimated at between 1 billion-1.6 billion. But the true cost in lost business/less scaling would likely be far higher.

The governments briefing note on its legislative program itself notes that the U.K.s data market represented around 4% of GDP in 2020; also pointing out that data-enabled trade makes up the largest part of international services trade (accounting for exports of 234 billion in 2019).

Its also notable that Johnsons government has never set out a clear economic case for tearing up U.K. data protection rules.

The briefing note continues to gloss over that rather salient detail saying that analysis by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) indicates our reforms will create over 1 billion in business savings over 10 years by reducing burdens on businesses of all sizes; but without specifying exactly what regulatory changes its attaching those theoretical savings to.

And thats important because keep in mind if the touted compliance savings are created by shrinking citizens data protections that risks the U.K.s adequacy status with the EU which, if lost, would swiftly lead to at least 1 billion in increased compliance costs around EU-U.K. data flows thereby wiping out the claimed business savings from less privacy red tape.

The government does cite a 2018 economic analysis by DCMS and a tech consultancy, called Ctrl-Shift, which it says estimated that the productivity and competition benefits enabled by safe and efficient data flows would create a 27.8 billion uplift in U.K. GDP. But the keywords in that sentence are safe and efficient; whereas unsafe EU-U.K. data flows would face being slowed and/or suspended at great cost to U.K. GDP.

The whole data reform bill bid does risk feeling like a bad-faith PR exercise by Johnsons thick-on-spin, thin-on-substance government i.e., to try to claim a Brexit boon where there is, in fact, none.

See also this key fact which accompanies the governments spiel on the reform claiming:

The UK General Data Protection Regulation and Data Protection Act 2018 are highly complex and prescriptive pieces of legislation. They encourage excessive paperwork, and create burdens on businesses with little benefit to citizens. Because we have left the EU, we now have the opportunity to reform the data protection framework. This Bill will reduce burdens on businesses as well as provide clarity to researchers on how best to use personal data.

Firstly, the U.K. chose to enact those pieces of legislation after the 2016 Brexit vote to leave the EU. Indeed, it was a Conservative government (not led by Johnson at that time) that passed these highly complex and prescriptive pieces of legislation.

Moreover, back in 2017, the former digital secretary Matt Hancock described the EU GDPR as a decent piece of legislation suggesting then that the U.K. would, essentially, end up continuing to mirror EU rules in this area because its in its interests to do so to in order to keep data flowing.

Fast-forward five years and the Brexit bombast may have cranked up to Johnsonian levels of absurdity but the underlying necessity for the government to maintain unhindered data flows, as Hancock put it, hasnt gone anywhere or, well, assuming ministers havent abandoned the idea of actually trying to grow the economy.

But there again the government lists creating a pro-growth (and trusted) data protection framework as a key purpose for the data reform bill one which it claims can both reduce burdens for businesses and boosts the economy. It just cant tell you how itll pull that Brexit bunny out of the hat yet.

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UK opts for slow reboot of Big Tech rules, pushes ahead on privacy reforms - TechCrunch

Orlando Economic Partnership

The world's leading location where tech companies & a deep talent pool intersect, turning dreams into reality for the metaverse & Web3 development

ORLANDO, Fla., May 11, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Orlando region is home to next-gen gaming, entertainment, artificial intelligence, AR/VR, IoT and simulation training companies. The people, entrepreneurs and businesses here created the most engaging, technologically-advanced region in the world over several decades and are now doing the same for the metaverse, making Orlando the MetaCenter.

The declaration of the MetaCenter comes after the announcement of Unbelievably Real a new brand that tells the complete story of Orlando, both the fantastical and authentic elements of the metro, in both tourism and business. The MetaCenter is an important piece of the unbelievably real work happening here.

After watching intently for years as the building blocks of this new frontier unfold, the metaverse is taking shape and it is evident that Orlandos tech companies play a big part in developing this new world, said David Adelson, Chief Innovation Officer at the Orlando Economic Partnership. Theres no other region in the world that combines creativity, technology and innovation like we do and thats what makes Orlando the MetaCenter.

Orlando and the surrounding region has evolved into a booming tech hub, home to everything from startups to global giants, all powering the technology that is creating the metaverse and helping businesses access what both Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley pegged as an $8 trillion growth opportunity.

The Orlando Economic Partnership is taking the entire region into the metaverse, working with Unity to create a digital twin of the 800-square-mile metro area that will use new 3D technology to map out scenarios on everything from infrastructure to real estate to talent availability to climate change. The Orlando region has one of the highest concentrations of Unity licenses in the country, thanks to the number of local companies working in modeling, simulation, and training, as well as theme parks, gaming and entertainment.

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From simulation and modeling to game development, world building, and even Imagineering, Orlando houses not only the talent, but also the business-friendly climate incentives that are needed to develop the metaverse, said Cathy Hackl of the Futures Intelligence Group, who is popularly known as the Godmother of the Metaverse. As the future of the web takes shape, its clear that the Orlando region is becoming the MetaCenter that will have a huge impact in the short- and long-term evolution of the metaverse.

Hackl, a globally recognized tech futurist and metaverse/Web3 advisor to top brands, has paved the virtual I-4 to the digital world. Through her work at Magic Leap and her close relationship with Full Sail University, located in Orlando, shes experienced first-hand how the tech ecosystem from Orlando to South Florida has become a global epicenter where technology meets creativity, enabling the future of the internet. Hackl and her company are working with the Orlando Economic Partnership on the regions metaverse strategy. As the future takes shape, all eyes are on Orlando waiting to see whats next.

With the states status already solidified as a launch pad for science and innovation, Orlandos investment in being first to market as the global leader in technology hubs that empower the metaverse is uncompromised. Similarities can be seen in Miami as it emerges as the crypto city of the future. However, it is Orlando that companies are flocking to as the hotbed for talent and development.

Its not just Orlando companies paving the way for the future of the metaverse, but our universities, said Buddy Dyer, Mayor of Orlando. From the University of Central Florida (UCF) to Full Sail University, we are seeing students graduating well-versed in modeling simulation and AR/VR. With 550,000 college students within a 100-mile radius of Orlando, there is no comparison in the country when it comes to young talent. We are training the workforce of the future.

Leaders from entertainment, sports, fashion, retail and academia already call the Orlando region home, and this diversity of innovation which occurs locally, has proven to have a global reach with the formalization of the first MetaCenter.

The MetaCenter combines the many diverse pieces of our Orlando technology ecosystem providing unlimited opportunity for talent and entrepreneurs, said Charlie Lewis, Chair of The Orlando Tech Council. The Orlando technology community continues to grow, the identification of the MetaCenter is a building block for our community to plug in.

Orlandos groundbreaking ability to leverage its MetaCenter as the hub for leading sectors that power Web3 innovation include:

AR/VR: Orlando is the modeling and simulation training capital of the world. With more than $6 billion in contract work annually, AR/VR technology is at the core of creating the metaverse in Orlando; companies include Disney, Universal, Lockheed Martin, Falcons Creative, Brand XR, AVT Simulation and Red 6.

Gaming: The industry is fed by a local talent pool from several higher ed programs, including UCFs graduate video game design program, ranked as the top program of its kind in the world three times in the past six years; leading companies include Electronic Arts, Iron Galaxy, 302 Interactive, Echo Interaction,, Unity, and GameSim.

Artificial Intelligence: Orlando companies are driving AI innovation in everything from HR to defense to IoT and healthcare, with a lineup that includes Checkr, SoarTech, Kore.ai, Care.ai, MindSphere and AdventHealth.

3D Reconstruction: CREOL, UCFs College of Optics and Photonics, is a world leader in education, research, innovation and partnerships in optics, lasers and photonics, providing talent for companies like Luminar, NeoMetrix, Lensar, Dash, Simetri, .decimal and TrueScan.

IoT: Leading companies are calling innovation hubs like NeoCity and Lake Nona home, including SkyWater, BRIDG, imec, and Micross.

We are a destination that welcomes millions of visitors each year who come here to experience cutting-edge entertainment and technology, said Jerry L. Demings, Mayor of Orange County. The innovations happening here will be experienced in the virtual metaverse, but also in the physical world where the metaverse is brought to life in our world-renowned theme parks.

For more on the MetaCenter, please visit TheMetaCenter.org and follow on Twitter @the_MetaCenter.

To learn more about the Orlando Economic Partnership and the Orlando region, please visit Orlando.org or follow @orlpartnership on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

About the Orlando Economic Partnership The Orlando Economic Partnership (the Partnership) is a public-private economic and community development organization that works to advance Broad-based Prosperity by strengthening Orlandos economy, amplifying Orlandos story, championing regional priorities, empowering community leaders and building a brilliant region. These five foundational objectives serve to improve the regions competitiveness while responding to the needs of communities, residents and businesses.

About The MetaCenterThe MetaCenter is the physical and digital intersection in the Orlando region where next-gen gaming, entertainment, artificial intelligence, AR/VR, IoT, modeling and simulation training companies are driving innovation for developing the metaverse and Web3 applications. The people, entrepreneurs, businesses and talent pool have created the most engaging, technologically-advanced region in the world, making the Orlando region the MetaCenter and another example of the unbelievably real advancements taking place here.

Media Contact:Maddie MeyerUproar PR for Orlando Economic Partnership mmeyer@uproarpr.com573-535-1761

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Orlando Emerges as the Center of the Metaverse - Yahoo Finance

Andy Jassy, chief executive officer of Amazon.Com Inc., during the GeekWire Summit in Seattle, Washington, U.S., on Tuesday, Oct. 5, 2021.

David Ryder | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Shares of Amazon have given up nearly all of their gains from the pandemic.

The stock closed at $2,177.18 on Tuesday, up just .06% from Monday. The last time Amazon traded around these prices was on Feb. 20, 2020, when the stock reached an intraday high of $2,176.79. That's before the name dipped in March 2020 along with the rest of the market during the initial pandemic uncertainty in the U.S. It's more than 40% off from the company's 52-week intraday high of $3,773.08, which it hit July 13, 2021.

Amazon's three-year stock chart.

CNBC

The company's stock skyrocketed in 2020 and 2021 as e-commerce boomed during the pandemic, with consumers flocking to online retailers for everything from face masks and Lysol wipes to patio furniture and dumbbells. Amazon and other digital retailers now face growing pressure to prove they can sustain the high-flying growth they enjoyed during the crisis, as the economy reopens and consumers head back to physical stores.

Amazon's latest earnings report did little to ease those concerns. The company posted its slowest revenue growth since the dot-com bust and provided an outlook for the current quarter that fell short of Wall Street's estimates.

Shifting market conditions have added another challenge. Investors began to rotate out of tech stocks at the end of last year, spurred by rising inflation and the specter of higher interest rates. That trend accelerated this year, after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, causing oil prices to spike further. Stocks have sold off further in recent days after the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate on Wednesday.

The sell-off has hit the technology sector particularly hard, with tech giants losing more than $1 trillion in value between Thursday and Monday.

WATCH: 'We like Big Tech stocks like Amazon and Apple right now,' says Needham's Laura Martin

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Amazon stock has lost nearly all of its gains from the pandemic - CNBC

SAN FRANCISCO, May 11, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Sequoias San Francisco, a 26-story landmark alongside Japantown, redefines residents' dining experience by expanding to include two Executive Chefs with nearly 50 years of combined experience.

Executive Chef Tsitsi Helman oversees culinary operations at the life plan retirement community with over 350 residents.

Chef Helman comes from a list of discerning palettes having worked for several Bay Area tech giants and was a former personal chef to an Oracle Corp. co-founder.

The pandemic pivoted Helman's corporate dining career, as many workplaces moved to remote-only. Following her passion for food and the kitchen, she studied nutrition essential to healthy aging.

"Quickly, I fell in love with the residents," said Chef Helman after joining The Sequoias. She enjoys delighting everyone with options. "We have a lot of vegetarians and vegans. I surprise them with quinoa cakes, kale salads, or cauliflower steaks for dinner," along with favorite comfort foods and special requests.

Chef Christopher Miller, director of dining services, brings his culinary experience working for The Ritz-Carlton and prominent figures includingElon Musk. Chef Miller's upbringing contributed to his passion for simple, yet sophistacted California-style cuisine inspired by his mother and culinary giants including Julia Child.

The chefs, along with a dietician and a resident-led dining committee, create menus inspired by seasonal ingredients. "It is our mission to celebrate what San Francisco is about an amazing town of restaurants," says Chef Miller. "We approach our cuisine the same as the restaurants: We create the best possible dining experience for our residents."

At The Sequoias, each meal is an experience, keeping up with food trends and taking nutrition into consideration while keeping flavors authentic. Ingredients are fresh, and produce is locally sourced within 250 miles, for people with all taste preferences. Residents can choose between the main menu or the MarketPlace inspired by tapas, small plates with global influences, and authenticity.

For media inquiries or questions about Sequoia Living communities, email [emailprotected].

About The Sequoias San FranciscoThe Sequoias San Francisco, owned and operated by nonprofit Sequoia Living, is a Life Plan community providing Bay Area seniors with independent and assisted living, memory care, and skilled nursing. Residents enjoy outings, special events, music, art and cultural activities. Getting older isn't the last chapter it's the beginning of a new adventure where we Never Stop Growing.

SOURCE Sequoia Living

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Dining at The Sequoias San Francisco Takes on New Fusion with Chefs Helman and Miller - PR Newswire

Supreme Court observers were shocked when someone within the institution leaked a draft opinion from Justice Samuel Alito that would overturn Roe v. Wade. The unprecedented move may have violated every norm within that hallowed cloister, but anyone familiar with the contentious debate over abortion did not bat an eye. The scandal of a leak pales in comparison to what followed: the exposure of the Justices' personal information online and threats that reportedly led Alito and his family to go into hiding. It was only a matter of time before the Court would suffer through what has been the norm for pro-life activists for some time.

It does not matter that the Dobbs case has not yet been settled; abortion supporters have shown they will act preemptively to intimidate and silence their opponents. The unrest that followed the leakincluding an alleged arson attack at a Wisconsin pregnancy center serving women and threatened disruption of Catholic massesis a preview of what is to come. The intimidation campaign will not just play out in the public square, but in the digital realm as well. While Americans can rely on the police to intervene to safeguard their rights in the former, they may be on their own in the latter.

The institutions charged with safeguarding data and free speech have abdicated that duty, and even encouraged online assaults against abortion opponents.

Hours before state legislators passed a law cracking down on the willful termination of unborn human beings, Texas Right to Life, a nonprofit group dedicated to helping young mothers and their children, found itself under attack. It was not just the usual mix of protesters or activist journaliststhe pro-life group has dealt with those types for decadesbut a coordinated campaign from big business and online trolls whose sole goal was to silence and intimidate pro-life Texans into abandoning the unborn.

Hackers took over the Texas Republican Party's website in retribution for the state's abortion law. Others accessed the personal information of teenagers who had the audacity to apply for internships to serve pregnant women through Texas Right to Lifeand then Tweeted about it. In the days that followed, tech companies sided with them. GoDaddy terminated its relationship with Texas Right to Life, following in the footsteps of Amazon Web Services (AWS) which months earlier had kicked a conservative social media startup off its servers because of a public pressure campaign.

The volunteers at Texas Right to Life ignored the keyboard warriors and the spineless sweatshirt warriors of Silicon Valley, and went back to the hard work of serving the poorest and most vulnerable human beings in America. Finding a new web server should have been a walk in the park. They did not realize the stranglehold that the likes of GoDaddy and AWS have on the industry, or the willingness of hubristic tech giants to let their politics drive their business practices.

Texas Right to Life would have been at the mercy of Silicon Valley were it not for a tech startup that had both the capability to safeguard the group's data and a commitment to the freedom of speech. Pro-lifers found a new online home at RightForge, a full-service web company founded to offer an escape from the mob mentality.

There are still a few power players committed to the First Amendment (as Elon Musk's Twitter bid makes clear), but unless online architecture itself is rooted in a commitment to free speech even the world's richest man is vulnerable to censorship. Even if Musk is successful in overcoming the social media giant's culture of suppression, there is nothing to stop GoDaddy, AWS or other web giants from pulling the plug.

The censorious atmosphere that pervades the industry is a direct product of the near monopoly control that tech giants enjoy. They no longer see themselves as pillars of free speech, but conduits of power politics, confident that their clients have nowhere else to turn to if they do not conform to the whims of billionaire oligarchs.

The women at Texas Right to Lifethe vast majority of its volunteers are womenhave never taken the easy road. They refused to bow to the demands of the mob or its enforcers in Silicon Valley. They accepted that there would be a price to pay; they were subjected to the attacks of ruthless menfor nearly all hackers are menand the indifference of the companies they trusted to protect them. Their associated website was offline for only a few hours before RightForge reached out and offered the same safe haven Texas Right to Life has provided to tens of thousands of women and children over the years.

The attacks soon quieted, and the hackers and oligarchs turned their attention to the next object of hate. The leak of Alito's draft has given the Supreme Court and American society a preview of what pro-lifers can expect if justices overturn Roe. The difference is, Texas Right to Life is prepared for what comes next.

Elise Rhodes-Pierotti is senior vice president at RightForge, and the former chief marketing officer at Parler.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

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The Next Stage Of The Abortion Battle Will Be Fought Online | Opinion - Newsweek

One sunny Thursday morning in September 2021, three men gathered at the Multimedia University of Kenya, in Nairobi, for a small ceremony. The usually pristine grass of the campus was brown and dry. Jacaranda petals, fallen off the trees but still vibrantly purple, littered the ground, and a troop of baboons rummaged through garbage cans for leftover food. Inside the universitys ICT Museum, which showcases developments in communications technology, the men turned their attention to an object at the center of the room.

Above a table crowded with old oscilloscopes, printers, and telephones, hung a lone box, white apart from two black solar panels fanning out from its top. Gray antennae protruded beneath, trussed like the legs of an oil rig. This jerry-built device was among the last remaining specimens of Loon, what had been Googles moonshot project to connect rural Africa and other locations to the internet, using balloons floating in the stratosphere.

In 2015, when asked which current project he was most excited about, thenAlphabet CEO Larry Page mentioned Loon. Theres very many places you go in the world where you still dont have a cell signal. And I think Loon actually could change that, he said. Page dreamt of giant white balloons semi-autonomously navigating along atmospheric currents for thousands of miles, beaming connectivity down to remote areas or disaster zones. But by January 2021, after nearly a decade of work and hundreds of millions of dollars spent, the projects lead announced that its journey [was] coming to an end. Loon was dead, owing to the costs being too high to build a long-term, sustainable business. Instead of connecting the unconnected, Loon would join the artifacts at the ICT museum. (Rest of World was founded by Sophie Schmidt. Ms. Schmidt is related to Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google.)

For more than a decade, U.S. tech giants have had designs on building Africas internet. Alphabet is now at work on Project Taara, another moonshot, which aims to repurpose the Loon balloons airborne lasers. Meta previously Facebook has also floated airborne internet delivery systems, including using a satellite that would beam data to Africa from space (which was abandoned when the rocket carrying it was engulfed in flames on the launchpad) and its Aquila solar-powered drones (which were grounded after disappointing performances, including a crash landing). Elon Musks SpaceX seems to have had better luck, having now launched over 1,700 small satellites as part of its Starlink constellation, although it wont begin providing internet service in Africa to consumers until later in 2023.

But beneath these shiny objects in the sky laid, in fact, on the ocean floor are a series of more traditional and likely much more transformative efforts to bridge the connected and the unconnected. After years of anticipation, massive undersea fiber-optic cables, stretching thousands of miles, have begun arriving on African and European shores.

In March, the Ile de Brhat, a high-tech ship registered in France to Alcatel Submarine Networks, which is under the umbrella of telecomms giant Nokia, spooled out a cable as thick as a paper towel roll toward the beach in Lom, the capital of Togo. Once it was secured on land, an executive from Google posed for photos alongside a golden buoy, marking a key milestone in the companys ambitious project known as Equiano to link Africa and Europe using an undersea link of unprecedented capacity.

Lom was a prelude. In April, Google and its landing partner, West Indian Ocean Cable Company (WIOCC), erected a temporary auditorium on Elegushi Beach, in Lagos, Nigeria. Inside, a crowd packed with traditional rulers, high-ranking government officials, and executives of cloud and data center companies celebrated Equianos imminent arrival. (The actual cable landing is still ongoing.) What we jointly dreamt three years ago is becoming a reality, said Babajide Sanwo-Olu, governor of Lagos State.

The expected impacts will be substantial. According to research commissioned by Google, the Equiano cable will improve median download speeds in Nigeria by up to six times, reduce retail data prices by 21%, and create economic activity that will indirectly result in $10 billion added to the Nigerian GDP and 1.6 million new jobs. The intention is to provide more international bandwidth, said Juliet Ehimuan, director of business strategy in West Africa at Google. The cable leverages state-of-the-art technology to provide approximately 20 times more network capacity than the last cable built to serve the region, she said. The Equiano cable will make two more landings after Nigeria first in Swakopmund, Namibia, and later at Melkbosstrand, South Africa before connecting back to European networks in Sesimbra, Portugal.

Meta, not to be outdone, had its own ceremony in April, 2,600 miles due north, when Alcatels Ile de Batz spooled out another cable toward the beach in Genoa, Italy. Metas 2Africa cable, announced in 2020, will fully encircle the continent; like Equiano, it will connect in Portugal and head south off Africas Atlantic coast, but it will then continue counterclockwise around the Cape of Good Hope, past South Africa, up the Indian Ocean coast, crossing Egypt overland and connecting back to Europe on the Italian, French, and Spanish shores. Meta expects the construction of the cable and its 46 landing segments to be complete in 2024.

That something that is so profound for public communication is completely controlled by a private company is worrisome.

These two new pieces of infrastructure will connect Africa to the global internet more robustly than ever, but they will also place an unprecedented level of control in the hands of the U.S.-based tech giants. Google and Metas ambitions to build and own global data links mark a tectonic shift in how the internet works and who controls it.

The internets initial promise was to decentralize telecommunications, releasing consumers from the monopoly grip of telecomms incumbents. Over the last 30 years, the internet has done that, and much more. But undersea cables, owned by the internets behemoths, hint at a return to where we started: a near future in which a select group of massive corporations have not merely tightened their hold on our online activity but have deliberately rebuilt the internet for their own use, according to their own specifications, from the ocean floor up.

That something that is so profound for public communication is completely controlled by a private company is worrisome, Steve Song, a policy advisor at the Mozilla Foundation and a longtime advocate for internet access across Africa, told Rest of World.

If the giants cable building continues as planned, the future internet will be less a network of interconnected networks, as it was originally conceived and as it has grown, and more like a supranet, dominated by a handful of mega networks operating upon their own global physical infrastructure.

To understand the implications of that shift, Rest of World reported over two years on three continents, conducting more than two dozen interviews with policymakers, telecomms industrialists, data center owners, and net advocates. Overwhelmingly, people who spoke to Rest of World agreed that the construction of this huge new internet capacity will be a boon for hundreds of millions of internet users present and future across the continent. But the secondary consequences of Google and Metas ownership are less clear, and more worrying.

For regions with established internet networks, the evolution of tech giants like Google and Facebook into ISPs and internet infrastructure providers is alarming and sets the stage for antitrust concerns and gladiator battles between industry giants. But in a region where about 33% of the population is online, and connectivity is often limited, Meta and Googles installation of Equiano and 2Africa suggests a more definitive goal: the lasting control of the global link for 1.4 billion people. In Africa, the least connected continent, the stakes of Google and Metas ambitions are stark.

For about 150 years, telecomms companies owned all the worlds telecomms cables, selling the right to transmit a message or make a call. Whether government-backed monopolies or publicly traded corporations, they mostly abstained from meddling in the content of the communication itself, leaving that to newspaper owners and broadcasters the original content providers.

Google, founded as a search engine on a single bank of servers in 1998, was a new kind of company. Its powerful advertising business shook what became known as legacy media, and its acquisition of YouTube in 2006 gave it additional hold on our attention. All the while, it rapidly constructed a global physical infrastructure of astonishing breadth.

Google first began investing in the undersea cables that form the backbone of its international communications in 2008, partnering with a consortium of Asian telecomms companies to build Unity, a $300 million link that stretched from California to Japan. Over the next decade, more investments followed, with further cables across the Pacific and other cables connecting Florida and Brazil, and Australia, Singapore, and Indonesia. These cables were laid in partnership with telecomms giants like Singtel, KDDI, and China Telecom.

But in 2018, Google announced that it would be expanding its ambitions: rather than merely partnering with telecomms on new cables, it would plan a series of wholly owned new transoceanic cables, becoming the first major non-telecom company to do so, according to its own accounting. No longer merely a content provider, much less a search engine, Google would also become the owner and operator of its own global infrastructure, a far-reaching and distinct network effectively parallel to the internet itself.

Africa is the least served of all continents in terms of capacity, so anything that brings additional infrastructure investment to Africa has to be a good thing.

Googles undersea cable-building program was formidable from the start. In a characteristic nod to its corporate self-image as a band of playful geeks, the new cables would soon be named alphabetically after historical luminaries. The first, a cable from California to Chile, was named Curie, after the chemist and physicist Marie Curie; a cable from Virginia to France was dubbed Dunant, for Red Cross co-founder Henry Dunant. The E cable, stretching from Portugal to South Africa, was named for Olaudah Equiano, an 18th century author and abolitionist. Then theres Firmina, running from the eastern U.S. to Argentina, and Grace Hopper, stretching from the U.S. to the U.K. and Spain. While Google wont confirm any plans, the naming scheme leaves 19 letters left for future cables and plenty of ocean in which to lay them.

Google isnt the only internet giant putting infrastructure in the water. Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta have all invested in cables across oceans, usually partnering with one another or traditional telecomms. Their motivation in doing so is straightforward enough: the appetite for internet content is exploding globally; the existing cables are insufficient to deliver their products to their users; and, with troves of cash at their disposal, they see no reason to wait for telecomms companies to build new ones. According to the research firm TeleGeography, in 2010, content providers consumed 6.3% of total international cable capacity, leaving most of the rest to telecomms companies and other entities, like research-educational networks and governments. By 2021, that number had leapt to 69% a figure TeleGeography expects to grow again to 78% by 2027. Implicit in those statistics is how that traffic now mostly travels on cables wholly or partly owned by the content providers themselves. In 2010, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon had invested in only one long-distance cable; by 2024 they will own all or portions of more than 30.

Not long after Googles Equiano cable completes its southward run along the Atlantic seabed, Meta will follow with 2Africa. In September 2021, the company announced a further expansion of the cable: 2Africa Pearls, which will branch off near the Horn of Africa and connect India, Pakistan, and nearly all of the Gulf states. When complete, the combined system will be the longest undersea data cable in the world, bringing seamless international connectivity to 33 countries home to 3 billion people, or 36% of the worlds total population.

Africa or at least its coastal countries has been reasonably connected by undersea links since the tail end of the 2000s, when traditional telecomms and private consortiums built cables like MainOne to Nigeria, or Seacom and Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy) to Kenya and South Africa. But with gargantuan capacity enabled by the latest technology, Googles Equiano and Metas 2Africa will make those older cables functionally obsolete old mini buses in a fleet of shiny coaches.

For Meta, in particular, the value of 2Africas new bandwidth appears straightforward: more eyeballs on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Africas 400 million internet users consume only a fraction of the data that a European or American user might. As more Africans come online and data consumption grows, demand for bandwidth is set to explode. There will not be enough capacity on the subsea to be able to handle this kind of traffic growth, Ibrahima Ba, director of network investments in Europe, Middle East and Africa at Meta, told Rest of World in a Zoom call from his home in Virginia. And you can solve it only by a cable like this one.

In blog posts and videos, both Google and Meta emphasize the societal benefits of their cables, suggesting that they are acting, at least in part, altruistically. Google says the purpose of its cables is to interconnect humanity; Meta says 2Africa will ensure everyone can benefit from the economic, educational, and social advantages of a digitally connected world.

The reality is obviously more complicated. No question about it theyre doing it for selfish motives, said Byron Clatterbuck, former CEO of Seacom, a telecommunications venture that owns East Africas first broadband submarine cable system, which went online in 2009. But, by doing that, theyre also enabling more internet connectivity in Africa.

Tim Kelly, lead digital development specialist at the World Bank, says that, despite the profit motive, Google and Metas involvement in cables is a net positive. Africa is the least served of all continents in terms of capacity, he said, so anything that brings additional infrastructure investment to Africa has to be a good thing.

But owning the infrastructure gives the tech companies more control. Meta is partnering with seven telecomms companies to build its cable, in whats known in the industry as a club, and promises that bandwidth will be available on a fair and equitable basis. Google is more abstruse in its collaborations, publicly relying on partners for the landing segments in each country, while maintaining possession over the deepwater segments. Owning Equiano like owning all of its undersea cables gives Google technical and operational autonomy. It can do what it wants, where it wants, and when it wants.

"True, we will get connected, but the question is, what kinds of public policy will keep that power in check?"

Since we control the design and construction process, we can fully define the cables technical specifications, streamline deployment and deliver service to users and customers faster, explained Googles vice president of engineering, Ben Treynor Sloss, in a 2018 blog post. Google can plan its own underwater routes, serving the destinations in greatest need of additional bandwidth. Google can also draw on its colossal capital reserves Alphabet held nearly $150 billion in cash in the third quarter of 2021, more than the GDP of all but four African nations to overbuild capacity, allowing room for future growth. And it can connect markets ahead of any clear immediate demand an especially powerful lever in Africa. Once the cable is up and running, Googles network managers can prioritize Googles own data traffic, ensuring the performance and reliability of their cloud services while using that reliability as the services key selling point.

In a rapidly digitizing continent, Google and Metas plans worry Nanjira Sambuli, a tech/ICT policy analyst based in Nairobi who was a member of the influential UN Secretary-Generals High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation. While she recognizes the value, infrastructure-wise, of these companies involvement in cable building in Africa, she worries about the implications. True, we will get connected, she said. But the question is, what kinds of public policy will keep that power in check?

As more services migrate online, the stakes rise. The Equiano and 2Africa cables will not only carry social media and internet searches (and the ads that help monetize them) but also entire countries health, governance, and security data. In the absence for now of large African data centers to store it regionally, these digital services remain offshore. For Sambuli, the key need is for African governments to put forward policies that protect their citizens under the thumb of internet giants with a history of putting profits before society.

Its one thing if Facebook is answerable to a country in terms of social media, but its another if theyre also controlling infrastructure, she said. If they control the cables, internet companies could effectively dictate internet policy, even if that is not their explicit intent. Meta has confronted similar challenges with its Free Basics and Discover programs, which have been successful in bringing millions of people online but with content limitations that have drawn accusations of digital colonialism and being poor internet for poor people.

The internet, left unchecked, is a monopoly-making machine, an engine designed to concentrate power, attention, and more in the hands of those who already have it, observed James Ball in his 2020 book, The System.

Much depends on how Google and Meta exploit their control. We dont know all of the implications of what a proprietary cable would mean, said the World Banks Kelly. Maybe Facebook will do no evil or is it Google that does no evil? But ultimately, he added, they make their money through advertising, and they make their advertising by control of data, and therefore, one of the reasons that incentivizes them to own their own networks is because they can suck up every single bit of data from those networks.

Notably, Google and Meta have no intention of making a profit by selling the bandwidth itself. For its part, since Google is not a telecomms company, it has no plans to displace telecomms in the value chain. [Equiano] provides international bandwidth, but to get to the end user, you still need metro access; you need to cater for the last mile, which is the space that a lot of telcos and service providers play [in], Googles Ehimuan explained to Rest of World. The intention is to collaborate with them.

Phares Kariuki, CEO of Pure Infrastructure Limited, a cloud consulting company in Nairobi, sees Google and Metas cable building as a longer-term effort at commercial control. They started out because the internet was open, and now they are quickly creating a moat by closing it up and ensuring no one else can be as competitive as them, he said. As a relatively small-scale internet entrepreneur, he has little patience for the way the giants couch their efforts in claims of do-gooderism. Just say that its your own private infrastructure, dont sort of say that its to help infrastructure on the continent, Kariuki says. This is Google helping Google get more Google content on the continent.

In 2010, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon collectively owned only one long-distance cable; by 2024 they will own all or portions of more than 30

Googles Equiano cable will run from Portugal along the Atlantic coast of Africa to the small town of Melkbosstrand in South Africa

Metas 2Africa cable will also connect in Portugal before fully encircling the African continent, crossing Egypt and connecting back to Europe

Mombasa, Kenya, normally a cheery tourist haunt, was cloudy, dour, and gray on the morning Rest of World visited in September 2021. A few years back, the Mombasa governor directed all the buildings in the citys central business district to be painted in the same hues of blue and white. One such building, built in the old Swahili architectural style, serves a very contemporary purpose: it is the landing station for Seacom.

From inside Seacoms boardroom, a lone boatman was visible in the ocean, rowing, and behind him, a lighthouse. It felt appropriate: the Seacom landing station is, after all, a different kind of lighthouse one that pulses invisible flickers through the hair-thin strands of fiber-optic cables.

To reach here, the Seacom cable snaked its way underwater from South Africa, veering North, touching Mozambique and Tanzania, before landing in Mombasa. After Mombasa, it went around the Horn of Africa, splitting to Djibouti and India, before crossing Egypt and ending up in Marseille in France. The cable first arrived in Mombasa on a July morning, a little more than a decade ago. From the ship, it was brought ashore and one end was affixed through a conduit under the beach and into a manhole that connects to this building a process known as landing the cable.

In a room inside the landing station hum the machines that Kenyas internet users depend upon: generators, fans, racks of servers, and line-terminating equipment. A sample of undersea cable was kept on hand for visitors; when Rest of World lifted it, it was surprisingly light.

Seacom was the first of many cables to land in Kenya: the East African Marine Cable System (TEAMS) also landed in 2009, followed by EASSy in 2010, the Lower Indian Ocean NetWork II (LION2) in 2012, and the Djibouti Africa Regional Express (DARE1) in 2021. But the arrival of Equiano on the Atlantic coast this year and of 2Africa right here in Mombasa, likely in 2023, will mean a more substantial shift in both the business of telecommunications and the politics that pervade the industry.

Subsea, as its known, is traditionally a challenging business, with multi-hundred-million-dollar capital costs, followed by a relentless need for operational upgrades. Customers always demand more bandwidth, at lower prices. The more the customer base grows, the more you have to upgrade your system, eating into any growth in profits. Currently, Seacom and its competitors vie with one another to profitably sell bandwidth to African ISPs, international content providers, and farther-reaching global telecomms networks.

From the perspective of the terrestrial network owners, that effort can feel crushing. Historically, one company has controlled [the cable], and it can charge an extortionate amount of money just to connect between the terrestrial network and the submarine fiber, Chris Wood, CEO of WIOCC, which is a partner on both Equiano and 2Africa and has investments in numerous existing African cables, told Rest of World.

But Equiano and 2Africa, bought and paid for with the titanic profits of Meta and Google, derived primarily from their advertising businesses, wont have to be profitable at all. Clatterbuck, the former Seacom CEO, saw what that meant for his business: obsolescence. Do I bemoan the Yellow Pages not getting delivered every year? he told Rest of World in June 2020, one month after Metas 2Africa announcement and before his resignation as CEO in March 2021. Do I bemoan the Encyclopedia Britannica? We used to buy it every three years. I dont need it anymore. I think we move on, right?

Facebook and Meta are offering traditional telecomms an alternative business model: the opportunity to play middleman between their cables and inland users who will continue to depend on terrestrial cables deep in the continent. In exchange for bearing an unspecified bulk of the capital costs, Meta, for example, is getting direct links to the national and regional networks that connect the new international cables to national eyeballs.

Ibrahima Ba, in pushing the cable project for Meta, tunes his pitch to appeal to the regional telecomms. Do you want to make money on the subsea side? he asks his local partners, Or do you want to invest into the access and the retail side? Ba suggests the future rests with the latter option. A lot of operators now recognize that the investment needs to move on the retail side; thats really where the growth is; thats where the differentiation is, Ba said.

Rather than pursue the traditional model of creating a consortium or club, Google is instead selectively partnering with telecomms only for the branching units that connect the main ocean trunk of the cable to the spurs that land in each country. This allows Google to avoid running the regulatory maze of being a landing party, which is often subject to strict country-specific regulations and keeps most of the companys infrastructure investment in risk-free international waters.

Google can then mint its own kind of currency: it can trade the Equiano cables international bandwidth for domestic terrestrial bandwidth across Africa, and the complicated business of negotiating the construction, ownership, and regulatory challenges of fragmented assets in numerous countries that comes with it.

In Nigeria, for example, WIOCC is the landing party for the Equiano cable and it has also acquired a fiber pair on the cable. Each strand of fiber carries pulses of information-carrying light transmitted in one direction, so they always work in pairs; WIOCCs pair is just one of Equianos 12. When lit with the latest and greatest fiber-optic equipment, the pairs 12-terabit-per-second capacity dwarfs the bandwidth of all the pairs on existing undersea cable systems and gives WIOCC the international bandwidth it needs. We will connect to our national network in Nigeria, and then well sell services on that national network which would use our fiber pair to get to the rest of the world, CEO Chris Wood told Rest of World. So thats how each company would then monetize its asset, its investment.

Liquid Intelligent Technologies, a digital infrastructure company that operates cables and data centers across Africa, is pursuing a similar deal with Meta. In March 2022, the company announced that it has also acquired a fiber pair on Googles Equiano cable. We are working with Meta and Google and bringing internet cables inland, said Ben Roberts, its chief technology and innovation officer. In July 2021, Liquid announced its plans to build a 2,000 kilometer long-haul and metro fiber-optic cable network in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The cable will start at Muanda, where the 2Africa cable is slated to land, and run to the center of the country. Once completed, it will be a part of a bigger network extending to Congo-Brazzaville, Angola, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zambia. It will cross the African continent terrestrially, from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean, from Mombasa to Kinshasa, as Roberts put it. If you look at the dots we are trying to join up, we are having a terrestrial network, and we are trying to bring the networks inland, because if its just at the landing station, its no help to anyone, he said.

With their new international bandwidth, both WIOCC and Liquid will have the capacity they need to feed their hungry terrestrial networks. In the old telecomms regime, handing over this much capacity to a competitor would be commercially foolish. But Google and Metas cables neednt be profitable on their own but, rather, merely serve a far broader strategy one that highly values the terrestrial links to a billion eyeballs. If the old undersea cables operated by telecomms see Meta and Googles giant checkbook as a death warrant, the African terrestrial networks are eagerly embracing the symbiotic relationship they can have with Google and Meta.

Liquid has been upgrading its existing routes in anticipation of the new cables. Roberts said that, in less than two years, were going to be having 5G networks. These networks, invariably, will be key to the metaverse or whatever vision of the internet Meta, Google, and the other tech behemoths have in mind for Africa. What remains to be determined is how that meshes with the visions Africas internet builders have for themselves.

Since 2008, Michuki Mwangi has been regional development manager for Africa at the Internet Society, an international nonprofit founded in 1992 to promote the growth of the internet. In 2020, he wanted to measure and compare the total amount of data center floor space in Africa (a reasonable approximation of hosting capacity). The number he came up with 80,000 square meters astonished him. The U.K. alone had 500,000 square meters. And I was like, For a billion people, we have less than 100,000? Mwangi said.

The dearth of data center space was partly a reflection of low internet usage, but it also highlighted a separate issue: Africas internet was disproportionately imported. When a user in London navigated to a web page or service, in all likelihood that data was stored in a data center a kind of warehouse close by. But in Nairobi, and even more so in African cities further inland, such as Kampala or Lilongwe, the lack of local or even regional data centers meant that any request had to travel thousands of miles across undersea cables. As a result, performance suffered. Even at the speed of light, the journey took time and it was expensive.

In 2008, when Mwangi started at the Internet Society, 99% of African data traffic came from outside the continent, hosted on servers in Europe, America, and Asia. In coastal countries like Morocco, Egypt, and Tunisia, where undersea fiber-optic connections to Europe were available, he recalls that internet transit cost an average of $600 per megabit per second per month 60 times what it would cost in New York or London. In landlocked countries like Uganda, Zambia, and Botswana, where satellite was the only option, it was more than twice that, upward of $1,500 per megabit. Those were wholesale costs; internet service providers still had to transport those bits to users homes and offices.

Since then, as the number of data centers in Africa has increased, more data is being hosted on servers locally, and more data is being exchanged among African networks, rather than traveling back and forth tromboning, in internet jargon to London, Frankfurt, or Marseille. This is primarily accomplished through the creation of internet exchange points, which allow networks to connect directly to each other. Encouraging their growth has been a major aim of the Internet Society, which in 2010 had set the goal the grand vision, Mwangi called it of making 80% of internet content locally accessible in Africa by 2020.

They came close. According to its 2021 report, nearly 70% of traffic in both Kenya and Nigeria was localized. Partly owing to the falling costs that localization engendered, internet use in Kenya rose from 8.8% of the population in 2012 to 17.8% in 2017; in Nigeria it went from 16% in 2012 to 42% in 2020. You still have a population over a billion people that would need to be supported, said Mwangi. We havent scratched the surface in Africa.

What must come next in Africa is data centers. The new cables from Meta and Google will be fat pipes to the rest of the global internet, offering an abundance of bandwidth that would have been difficult to imagine in 2008. But perhaps counterintuitively, they are also expected to accelerate the shift to locally hosted data. A node on a network becomes more useful with more connections, a truism that becomes very practical for companies deciding where to store their digital assets. Multinational players can be assured of robust connections back to their existing hubs; regional operators can feed off of the beefed-up presence of those multinationals. The moment you put data centers and low-cost international submarine cable capacity, then a lot of things start becoming more possible, said Mwangi.

We havent scratched the surface in Africa.

Even before the new cables have arrived, there has been a significant boom in the number of data centers under construction. Icolo.io, which operates two data centers in Kenya one in Nairobi and one in Mombasa is doubling its capacity in the country, building a new one in each city and a data center in Mozambique. Liquids Africa Data Centres division operates nine locations in Nigeria, Togo, South Africa, and Kenya and has plans to build 10 new facilities in 10 African countries over the next two years. Raxio, which operates a facility in Uganda, is planning new buildings in markets like Ethiopia, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, and Cte dIvoire. Pan African Internet Exchange Data Centres (PAIX), which currently operates data centers in Kenya and Ghana, has plans to roll out to five other African countries. In November 2021, WIOCC announced plans to build more than 20 data centers across the continent, including one in Mogadishu, expected to be complete in 2022.

These companies are following the cables and looking to build the facilities they expect the international giants to want, as they increase their data center footprints to serve their newly burgeoning user bases.

During a visit to PAIXs Nairobi data center, Vincent Camadro, PAIX Kenyas managing director, laid out his companys strategy. In the U.S., he said, Google and Meta build their own data centers; in Africa, theyre going to rely on people like us to host them.

But just as with undersea cables, local and regional ownership is unlikely to last forever. In April 2022, Equinix, a California-based digital infrastructure behemoth with Fortune 500 status, finalized its $320 million acquisition of Nigerian-headquartered MainOne, which has data centers in Nigeria, Ghana, and Cte dIvoire. Judith Gardiner, the Equinix vice president for growth and emerging markets, saw plenty of room for further expansion. MainOnes land alone, she noted, was enough to build another ten data centers. Notably, Equinixs deal for MainOne came less than a year after it announced plans to build a data center in Genoa, Italy, that it said would serve as a strategic gateway for the 2Africa subsea cable system. The internet may be a network of networks but it has also proven to be, in James Balls phrase, a monopoly-making machine, with power often residing outside of Africa.

Early in the pandemic, at a moment when the digital transformations it had wrought were still jagged, the Internet Society hosted a webinar to celebrate its localization report and the progress that had been made in keeping African traffic local. Google had been a significant contributor to that long-term effort, investing in the network beachheads that serve its users, and Sylvie LaPerrire, a network strategist at Google and a leader of their Equiano effort, was on the panel. When, toward the end of the lunchtime session, Mwangi asked what can be done to further improve capacity, LaPerrire laid out Googles ambition with unusual candor.

I think we need stronger infrastructure, she said. We need more data centers, more intra-network in the data centers. We need more internet exchanges. We need more content platforms. More cloud operators. We need more of everything. In 15 years Africa will be 20% of the world population. Nows the time to really make a big bet.

Back on Elegushi Beach, in Lagos, nearly two years later, Googles bold intentions had become physically apparent. As the launch event for Equiano wound down inside the temporary auditorium, Rest of World walked down to the oceans edge. The Ile de Brhat, carrying the cable, had not yet appeared on the horizon. But just above the beach, engineers and contractors were putting the finishing touches on a three-story complex belonging to Open Access Data Centres (OADC), which operates under the WIOCC umbrella. It will support the terminating equipment for Equiano as well as a bloom of new servers installed to feed off of its prodigious bandwidth. The estimated $200 million facility, with an expected 20 megawatts of available power and room for 3,200 racks of servers, was merely OADCs starting point; the company has publicly committed to $500 million in further data center investment across Africa.

It will change completely the digital economy and the digital transformation of not only Lagos but indeed Nigeria, Sanwo-Olu, Lagos state governor, told those attending the launch event.

This stretch of sand is owned by the Lagosian royal family the Elegushis. Behind a security fence, families picnicked and played in the surf. Beneath them, silent but bright, Googles cable would soon change their connection to the world.

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Google and Meta's underwater cables up the stakes on internet control - Rest of World