Internet, territories and centralities

To understand this hyper-centralization, we must first reconstruct the chain allowing us to separate the causes and the effects. Effectively, massive datacenters are a result of the concentration of traffic delivery points. This concentration at just a few sites is a consequence of two phenomena: the first is the centralization of services, which is quite unexpected for people who have known the Internet for a long time. The second is the central role phone operators have managed to claim in a network that historically did not interest them.

The centralization of services is the best known, and probably most analyzed phenomenon in the "mainstream" press. It stems from a combination of factors, the best known of which is a form of audience immaturity. In a market where consumers are less informed and do not seem constrained by a budget, the mode effect and the announcement effect in marketing can influence choices much more rapidly. Typical analyses in the digital world call this phenomenon "the winner takes all."

The other element that underlies this centralization is the classic functioning of a market economy. When a sector appears, many companies offering very different services are founded. The market quickly "consolidates" and only a few large groups remain. Digital technology accentuates this phenomenon but does not change its nature.

The second phenomenon is less known to the general public. The Internet was created over and above telecommunications operations. It was created on top of them. We used the infrastructure leased to telecom people, but these actors played no role in the network’s functioning. When the Internet access market became sufficiently visible for them to understand that this was where the future lay, regulation failed to ensure that the market remain open. Very quickly, both in Europe and in the United States, the market was dominated by the historic operators, either telephone or cable. Until regulators got involved, several dozen public access providers in France shared the market in a fairly harmonious manner. After major regulatory efforts, only three or four remain. This concentrating of the network also tends to reduce points of interconnection.

Finally, there is a technical factor at work, but more marginally. It turns out that doing things simply is complicated. In computer science, designing a lightweight system with no (or few) central points is complicated. You have to have ruled out many complex but intuitive solutions in order to find the right, simple but unintuitive solution. Large groups generally do not make this effort simply because it is considered useless as it would keep the market open which, from their point of view, is negative.

This hyper-centralization has harmful effects that have long been identified by a number of actors from civil society, but are only now beginning to be perceived by the general public.

The first obvious effect is the absence of competition. The concentration of operators makes it such that the idea of competition is illusory. The example of mobile phones is striking: there has only been strong competition at two times in the past 20 years: when Bouygues arrived [on the market] and wanted to carve a niche between SFR and France Telecom, and when Free arrived about 15 years later. The rest of the time, the market was perfectly oligopolistic, incapable of innovation or evolution, with each player living off its returns.

The second effect we are now seeing is that all communication goes through a small number of easily controlled, easily monitored points. Mass surveillance of the population is only possible if everything goes through a handful of players who are too big to bother bickering with governments. The example that comes to mind is the NSA’s easily dipping into the data of American giants, but that’s not the only one. Any country that wishes to monitor its population operates on the same model. From the Tunisia of Ben Ali to modern-day China, when you want to monitor or control a population, you ensure that there are only few players and that the Government has a direct, strong means of leverage over the latter.

The third effect, still too poorly understood, is to privatize the police and the justice system. For example, a censorship or banishment decision made by a large platform is virtually impregnable. Just try to file a lawsuit in California (or Delaware) from Paris, Berlin or Cotonou. [It’s so difficult] that our governments find it interesting to underplay their sovereign obligations by asking platforms to self-regulate by eliminating nasty content themselves.

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The construction of the fiber optics network is an opportunity, already missed, of a political choice in the literal sense of the term, of land use, and thus, societal choices.

The spread of fiber optics is a must. Other networking techniques will soon run out of steam, whereas fiber has just started warming up. The expected benefits are partly unchanging: a territory not adequately covered by the network is a dead zone, like a territory not covered by telephone or road networks in the late 20th century. This benefit will then take place regardless of the method of coverage.

What could change, however, is the distribution of the digital economy within the territory. Either we adapt the network to the major operators, and they don’t change their structure - engineering will remain in Paris and call centers in North Africa - or we adapt the network for use by small operators in coherent economic conditions, and encourage skilled SMBs to emerge locally in the territory concerned. And hence a pool of expertise [forms], not only in providing access to the general public but, above all, techniques that directly or indirectly affect the network. Thus do we encourage the creation of a local ecosystem around digital technology.

In the early days of work on fiber optics, between 2005 and 2007, the ARCEP [Autorité de Régulation des Communications Électroniques et des Postes] made strong statements about certain topics. I remember a sentence that was stressed by the then-president: “It would be unacceptable to have to move to change fiber optics operators. We won’t allow it.”

Ten years later, and here we are. The normal situation is that in areas covered by Orange, you have to move to change operators.

The operators, who are the first investors in these networks, have managed to impose their will on the regulatory body and Government, ensuring that the resulting arrangement is adapted to their needs and effectively excluding any risk of local competition. The method for imposing their will is irrelevant, only the result is interesting. France will be fibered, which is a good thing, but with a hyper-centralized system that will continue to drain all the skills to Paris or the United States, transferring the growth sources associated with digital technology outside of the territory - which is a negative point - while reinforcing the dominant positions of economic players whose size alone is enough to make them dangerous.

Too big to fail. We learned the expression from banking in 2008. We obviously didn’t get it.