Colonial telecom infrastructure control persisted through independence

Evidence

For example, Britain forced companies that operated transatlantic submarine cables to use London as their connection hub (after World War I, the epicenter for global communications shifted from England to the United States). Ownership of the new communication infrastructure continued to follow colonial models as well by concentrating it in the hands of a few multinational consortia of state and private-sector corporations. When independence was finally achieved, former colonies simply inherited the infrastructure of the colonizers and in many cases were pressured to allow foreign companies to continue to control and profit from that infrastructure. To attempt to intervene with that model could have potentially disastrous results, as evidenced by the extreme example of Chile, where the US-based International Telephone & Telegraph corporation played a crucial role in the CIA-backed overthrow of the government in 1973 after democratically elected president Salvador Allende threatened, among other measures, to nationalize the telecom industry. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 314

Categorization

• XREF: Complements the reader’s platform/surveillance work: telecom infrastructure as geopolitical control recalls concerns about overseas undersea cable control and NSA/global fiber interception. — connects to: Colonial discipline targeted worker mobility and communication, not just labor binding. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1222
• ADDENDUM: The Chile/ITT example of state intervention being violently punished parallels the ‘On Sacrifice’ article’s theme of costly sovereign defiance, and the infrastructure-inheritance pattern supports the data-colonialism frame being gathered.

Broader Connections

• Colonial discipline targeted worker mobility and communication, not just labor binding. #expands (0.72) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1222