The Invisible Seafaring Industry That Keeps the Internet Afloat

Undersea cables, and long-distance communications in general, became the highest of high tech, with many of the same connotations as rocket science or nuclear physics or brain surgery would acquire in later decades. Some countries and companies (the distinction between countries and companies is hazy in the telco world) became very good at it, and ... See more

Establishing connections became a problem. All Maersk's computers and servers had crashed, so email and the company's internal chat system were down. To his surprise, Andy also found that the contacts on employees' phones had been wiped clean, because they were configured to fetch contacts from online servers, which had now been deleted. The Maiden

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At the heart of the story of how the internet broke the media business model is the simple fact that the internet was not built to facilitate the flow of money. Payments weren’t built into the internet’s infrastructure—it was considered too risky. Marc Andreessen called this “the original sin of the internet.”