Landlords of the Internet - Notes

Greene, D. (2022). Landlords of the internet: Big data and big real estate. Social Studies of Science, 52(6), 904–927. https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127221124943

Intro

The physical assets at the core of the internet, the warehouses that store the cloud’s data and interlink global networks, are owned not by technology firms like Google and Facebook but by commercial real estate barons who compete with malls and property storage empires
Under their governance, internet exchanges, colocation facilities, and data centers take on a double life as financialized real estate assets that circle the globe even as their servers and cables are firmly rooted in place.
From One Summer, fiber optics belonging to consumer internet service providers (ISPs) like Comcast and commercial internet ‘backbone’ providers like CenturyLink travel up and down the coast.
If the internet is a ‘network of networks’ then those networks must have physical points of interconnection. These points must be housed, guarded, and maintained, lest traffic be disrupted and the global economy stall
, in which tenants make their networks available for interconnection, create private connections with strategic partners, and store digital assets
But if we look at the physical foundations supporting the rest of the internet, it is not software developers in control, but firms like Equinix and Digital Realty; whom I
REIT - Investopedia
A company owns income-producing properties and pools the capital of multiple investors, who earn dividends from real estate investments

Starosielski’s (2015) touchstone cultural history of undersea cable networks describes the successive political-economic regimes that laid and fixed telegraph cables and fiber optics.
Rather than rebutting internet evangelists’ stories of a weightless, seamless network, this literature allows us to approach the cables and cages of internet infrastructure as yet another ‘boring thing’ that, like bridges or telephone books, conceals deep social conflict. Indeed, by asking the question of who owns the internet in terms of those cables and cages, rather than the content moving through them, we can understand the world-making power of the internet as one expression of a broader political economy of assetization that dominates contemporary capitalism – rather than an exogenous shock to that system.
The internet is just one (massive) example of an infrastructure project that, under the conditions of contemporary capitalism, was always already assetized.

The shape of the market

Internet exchange points (IXPs): public peering locations wherein multiple large purveyors of internet traffic, such as Network Service Providers or Content Delivery Networks, physically interlink their networks.
- Usually privately owned, but can be run as coop, nonprofit, or gov ventures