Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

“Many Net partisans are convinced that the Net is robust because its lines of communication are spread evenly across the planet. In fact, as you can see from this graphic, nearly all intercontinental Web traffic passes through a small number of choke-points. Typically these choke-points are controlled and monitored by local governments. Clearly, then, any Internet application that wants to stand free of governmental interference is undermined, from the very beginning, by a fundamental structure problem.”

“Bottlenecks are only one of the structural barriers to the creation of a free, sovereign, location-independent cyberspace,”

“I don’t need to tell you how dependent we are on submarine cables,” Avi says. “‘We’ meaning the Crypt, or society in general?” “Both. Obviously the Crypt can’t even function without communications linkages to the outside world. But the Internet and everything else are just as dependent on cables.”

Makes role of Starlink even more important in concept of decentralised ,censorship free internet than any other crypto NFT

“Those cables used to be owned by PTAs. Which were basically just branches of governments. Hence they pretty much did what governments told them to. But the new cables going in today are owned and controlled by corporations beholden to no one except their investors. Puts certain governments in a position they don’t like

Avi continues, “And as we’ve talked about many times, there are many reasons why different governments might want to control the flow of information. China might want to institute political censorship, whereas the U.S. might want to regulate electronic cash transfers so that they can keep collecting taxes. In the old days they could ultimately do this insofar as they owned the cables.”