Tunisia, Egypt, Miami: The Importance of Internet Choke Points
The news Thursday evening that Egypt had severed itself from the global Internet came at the same time as an ostensibly far less inflammatory announcement closer to home. Verizon, the telecom giant, would acquire “cloud computing company” Terremark for $1.4 billion.
Context & Ripple Effects
Two stories landed the same evening and made the same point from opposite directions. Egypt severed its national connection to the global Internet — companion reporting at the WSJ's Digits blog suggests it may have taken little more than a few phone calls to the country's ISPs. Within hours, Verizon announced a $1.4 billion purchase of Terremark, a cloud-computing operator whose facilities sit inside the physical plumbing of the network.
The pairing is the argument: whether a state flips a switch or a carrier writes a check, the Internet's openness runs through a short list of owners — of cables, exchanges, and now the data centers where computing itself concentrates. The Atlantic is using the blackout to say that choke points, long treated as technical trivia, are political and economic power.
First-order effects
- Egyptian citizens and businesses lose all national Internet access overnight, with the off switch demonstrably held by the state rather than any foreign actor.
- Terremark shareholders get a cash exit at $1.4 billion, and its enterprise cloud customers find their provider folded into Verizon's network-and-datacenter portfolio.
Second-order effects
- Competing carriers face pressure to answer Verizon's move by consolidating their own data-center assets, accelerating the merger race for cloud capacity that began in earnest last year.
- Enterprises routing traffic through concentrated hubs — and governments watching Egypt's shutdown succeed — both reprice the risk of depending on a handful of physical gateways.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, control over the Internet's choke points splits into two parallel regimes — states asserting kill-switch authority within borders and telecom giants consolidating cloud infrastructure across them — making 'who owns the pipe' a standing question of policy rather than procurement.
The trend: Control of the Internet is migrating toward its choke points — states learning they can sever national access, and carriers like Verizon buying up the data centers where the network actually lives.