Author: Sofie Flensburg and Signe Sophus Lai
Source: Platforms & Society
Abstract
In recent years, submarine cable systems have grown in size and velocity, with nation-states, venture groups, and US-based platform corporations investing heavily in this backbone of the global internet. However, a significant share of new cable projects are abandoned, prompting us to explore what this particular type of ‘ghost infrastructure’ can teach us about the ongoing reconfiguration of infrastructural power in digital societies.
To unfold these epistemic potentials, we apply online archival methods and identify 65 unrealised projects – that is, one ghost cable project for every ten cables laid across the ocean floor. We then explore the main ‘causes of death’, finding that lack of funding and geopolitical unrest are recurrent triggers of cable abandonment.
Investigating the ‘afterlives’ of deceased projects, we find that some disappear completely, others are acquired or replaced, while a final few are resurrected under altered names, with new owners and slightly adjusted routes.
Taken together, our analysis suggests an asynchronous power balance where smaller and regionally oriented market actors compete with platform corporations operating on a global market; where actors reliant on attracting external public and private funding are competed out of business by billion-dollar corporations with the necessary funds in-house; and where consortia spending years on negotiating, planning, and establishing a connection are being surpassed by single corporations moving at a higher pace.
This imbalance is self-reinforcing, as skewed market conditions allow dominant actors to advance their profit-generating services while sidelining others and deepening dependency, thereby consolidating the economic and infrastructural power of the platform corporations.