Landlords of the internet

Daniel Greene lays it out

The physical assets at the core of the internet, the warehouses that store and transmit data and interlink global networks, are owned not by technology firms like Google and Amazon, but by commercial real estate barons who compete with malls and property storage empires. While the infrastructural turn has brought data centers and transcontinental cables further into view in technology studies, the economic life of these massive projects has come under less scrutiny. Granted an empire by the US at the moment of the internet’s commercialization, these internet landlords and their particular business model shaped how the network of networks that we call the internet physically connects, and how personal and business data is stored and transmitted. 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. This article relates the history of the landlords of the internet, showing how a fundamental reconsideration of the business model at the heart of the internet changes how we understand internet governance and contemporary capitalism writ large.

…

The physical points of interconnection that knit together the network of networks we call the internet are built and maintained by landlords. They understand themselves to be competing with other real estate empires dealing in storage units, or malls, or apartments, or nursing homes. They extract rents from tenants who send and store large amounts of data, in order to compete with other, heavily-financialized real estate corporations. This market was created by the neoliberal property state during the internet’s commercialization, before growing in the dotcom boom, maturing in the bust as private equity bought up devalued assets, and expanding rapidly through Web 2.0. Their status secured through their transformation into REITs, internet landlords have today expanded across the globe, to the point where the only challenge to their power comes from their most powerful tenants—and even that threat looks unlikely to materialize. Their global reach comes not just from physical networks of warehouses and cables but the IRS-approved reality that those facilities are in fact a rentable part of the internet and a financial asset that circulates between global investors far removed from the physical location.

…

different communities have wished for different internets; that it would be cheaper, faster, cleaner, bigger, smaller, more accessible, private, democratic, open, preserved, or forgetful. Each of these values represents a need of some people somewhere, currently unmet. But the landlord’s internet is not produced for need; it is produced for exchange. 

…

the ease with which the property state handed over the internet, the initiative enterprising landlords took in its early days, and the breadth of their present empire shows that while it may still be different in the future, it seems it could only be this way today. A neoliberal American property state commercialized the internet.