The Geopolitical Economy of the Global Internet Infrastructure

Abstract

According to many observers, economic globalization and the liberalization of telecoms/internet policy have remade the world in the image of the United States. The dominant roles of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have also led to charges of US internet imperialism. This article, however, argues that while these internet giants dominate some of the most popular internet services, the ownership and control of core elements of the internet infrastructure—submarine cables, internet exchange points, autonomous system numbers, datacenters, and so on—are tilting increasingly toward the EU and BRICS (i.e., Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) countries and the rest of the world, complicating views of hegemonic US control of the internet and what Susan Strange calls the knowledge structure.