January 30 2025 GM

From TCU Wiki

Undersea Cables in Africa - New Frontiers for Digital Colonialism

Glitter Meetups

Join us on 30th January to hear from Esther Mwema, an award-winning artist and digital inequalities expert from Zambia, who will be talking about:

  1. Analysis of undersea cables ownership by Big Tech in Africa  
  2. Art as a focal point of resistance and advocacy
  3. Internet infrastructure and Climate justice in the African context

Esther Mwema is an award-winning artist and digital inequalities expert from Zambia. Her focus is on Internet governance, digital colonialism and Internet infrastructure. She has over a decade of experience working at both the high level, such as at the UN, and at the grassroots level with the two organisations that she has founded: Digital Grassroots and SAFIGI Outreach Foundation. She is an Advisory Board Member of the Digital Democracy Initiative. Yon can reach her at h.mwema@atlanticfellows.org or @esther on Mattermost.

What is Glitter Meetup?

Glitter Meetup is the weekly town hall of the digital rights and Internet Freedom community at the IF Square on the TCU Mattermost, at 9am EDT / 2pm UTC. It is a text-based chat where digital rights defenders can share regional and project updates, expertise, ask questions, and connect with others from all over the world! Do you need an invite? Learn how to get one here.

Notes

Can you share an overview of the research you conducted? What prompted you to study undersea cables in Africa? Can you share the link and any available resources?
  • Yes, the depressing stuff of infrastructure. This is an image of Meta's undersea cable in Africa. These ones belongs to Google. I am an artist and digital inequalities expert. Traditional academic research is not a natural instinct for me, but I'm so glad I wrote this paper with my mentor Dr. abeba Birhane.
  • The research looks at the relationship between telegraph cables from colonial times and present day undersea cables including Meta's 2Africa and Google's Equiano. We find that there is a strong relationship between colonial era policies and extraction, that has resulted in big techs ability to literally build undersea cables around the African continent.
  • https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13637
Are these images widely available online or you had to dig to find them?
  • The Submarine cable map website shows existing undersea cable networks and the corporation's behind them. It's a rabbit hole, really, to find the decision maker because most ownership is hidden. That's what makes this more dangerous because of the hidden power as more people go online.
  • https://www.submarinecablemap.com/
  • It's like following breadcrumbs. When I received the Mozilla Creative Media Award in 2022, I embarked on creating artwork about layers of the Internet and the colonial roots of internet infrastructure. Before my project ended in 2023, information about Meta's 2Africa and Google's Equiano came out, like out of the blue. I found it jarring that information of the largest undersea cable in the world surrounding the African continent was not mainstream news. They went live last year, in 2024 and many folks still don't know about it.
Now that we know its owned by google and Meta, How much of the internet does it power? Is it only powering Africa? And are the lands that they occupy strategic? Obviously seeing the meta one takes the transatlantic route.
  • Private sector owns 99 percent of undersea cables. Only 1 percent is owned by the government.
  • Meta has built the longest undersea cable surrounding the entire continent with the highest capacity of 180 terabits per second capacity. This surrounds the African continent with at least 30 landing ports.
  • Google's Equiano covers West Africa. And they are building fibre optic cables called Umoja along the critical mineral belt in East and Southern Africa.
  • There are other continental undersea cables, like SEACOM for example, which has now onboarded onto Google's cable. In time, we risk big tech owning most of the internet infrastructure in the world.
  • We are seeing big tech now owning infrastructure as of around 2020 so this is very new. And they are using colonial policies to do that.
  • Right now, the cables surround the continent but it's up to African countries to connect to Meta and Google so that they remain tax free and unregulated.
If they own most (all) of the internet infrastructure, what does this essentially mean for idea and practice of “decolonizing” the internet. Or creating community owned digital technologies or decentralizing the internet, etc?
  • Both Google and Metas projects are very young. They went live around six months ago so they don't own everything YET. But our data is going through to them and their data centers which are outside the continent.
  • One thing I noticed is that most of the advocacy happens around the top layer of the internet - on these platforms. There is negligible advocacy and strategies for a truly public owned internet. We see a lot of efforts on last mile connectivity such as Community networks but ultimately all this feeds back into undersea cables and data centers owned by big tech. None of the data centers are owned by Meta. They conveniently take the data out of the continent and possibly (DEFINITELY) feed their AI.
  • Demistifying how the internet works is an important step in decolonizing. People need to know what the risks are for democracy, internet freedom, and even ethical AI. It all boils down to the infrastructure.
What are some of the risk that you have assessed from your work?
  • These companies already have massive power on the internet, owning infrastructure would threaten an open and free internet. It really comes down to who owns the infrastructure to determine how far one can go.
  • The risk is that no institution wants to fund this kind of work and our paper even got rejected from FaccTs because they didn't know where to situate it. I had no intention of writing a research paper - it's a tedious process that is not funded because no institution wants to back this type of work. I was funded by the Mozilla Foundation through the Creative Media Award and Green Screen Coalition to do this artwork. The research came in because my mentor Dr. Birhane believed it would add more weight to the art.
  • It took two years and I had to do it in my free time - and thankfully Dr. Birhane had weekly calls to work with me on the paper and getting it into a journal. Otherwise there's so much more to this and without institutional backing,the work is hard to get visible.
  • Artwork is more fluid in interpretation whilst the research is concrete and peer reviewed. I believe their is great strength in both but I think art reaches our intellect in ways that academic writing cannot.
  • You can find my art on www.afrogrids.com
  • This short story that I created and wrote explains the complexity of the issue through African storytelling: https://youtu.be/h7dovTBrnTY
  • You can read and download the full story here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_GOfMfdyN4pH9-kDRx_ka5WmdY18ckZV/view?usp=sharing
What's the relationship to traditional telecoms if any? (companies like Safaricom, Zain, MTN etc)
  • Meta formed a consortium with traditional telecoms but the power sharing is invisible. We don't really know. Google is more audacious and they are doing all this independently. The cables are not connecting to the countries so local ISPs need to connect to Meta and Google - paying them to be connected and threatened to be disconnected if they don't give the corps 'fair use'. So Google and Meta don't pay taxes basically.
Would it be better/different if cables were owned by governments given how much interference/control there could be?
  • I'm working on new artwork and reaching out to local activists about their vision for a publicly owned internet infrastructure. Feel free to reach out if anyone has ideas.
  • Basically Google and Meta are contractors with the US defence department and we all know about these billionaires and Trump.
  • We have to think of new models, since big tech is taking on entire continents and one country can't regulate that.
  • The Malabo convention for example was signed by only 15 of 55 African countries so there are a lot of loopholes Meta and Google can take advantage of at this scale.
Is there any way we can influence advocacy from outside Africa that would help you out right now?
  • There's many ways to help. Honestly, there is very little, if any advocacy about this. And the power these big tech get from extraction in Africa has global impact.
  • Most advocacy and funding doesn't look at infrastructure - but that's where the real power lies.
  • Support to artists, creators and amplifying this work goes a VERY long way. Plus supporting small groups on the ground.
Do the cables have any impact on the climate, the sea beds and the land?
  • Yes, unfortunately the impact of undersea cables has not been studied nor is there funding for it. What I do know is that Googles fibre optic cable named Umoja (like togetherness in Swahili) is right along the critical rare earth mineral belt.
  • There are implications on land ownership, conflict all in the name of green tech.
  • All infrastructure, especially internet infrastructure, relies on minerals and there's escalating violence in the region because of that.
Retrieved from "https://wiki.digitalrights.community/index.php?title=January_30_2025_GM&oldid=52502"