World Wide Web
Mapping the Internet
July 16, 2012: 5:00 AM ETWe don't think much about where the Net comes from. But a close look at where it's going will tell us where the world is headed.
By Andrew Blum, contributor
Unspooling fiber-optic cable that will soon be laid on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean
FORTUNE -- The global economy has arranged itself around a short list of dominant cities, the endpoints for movement of all kinds: goods, people, money, and, increasingly, packets of digital information. These packets -- some trillion bytes a second -- travel primarily as light through fiber-optic cable. E-mails, images, streaming movies, and money: millions and millions every millisecond.
We take it for granted that the Internet, as much as any city, has a physical reality. Tracing the movement of a packet of information throughout this geography of fiber-optic cables and data centers casts the global economy in a different light. In places, the packets piggyback on existing telecommunications systems, traveling through the same capitals of finance and trade that have long been at the center of things. Elsewhere, the Internet disrupts and reshapes the traditional endpoints of movement. By looking closely at our world's digital infrastructure, we can discern broader lessons about emerging economies. By understanding how information moves and how networks are constructed, we can see where the Internet is headed, and where the dominant cities of tomorrow might appear.
This story is from the July 23, 2012 issue of Fortune.
More: Mapping the Internet
Intro
Wiring America
Undersea cables
Financial hubs
Emerging markets
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Mapping the Internet: Financial hubs
Time is still money in the world of high finance. But dollars are now measured in milliseconds.
By Andrew Blum, contributor
FORTUNE -- When, in 1924, the Western Union Telegraph Co. went looking for land for a new headquarters in lower Manhattan, it had strict requirements: The building had to be close not only to the New York Stock Exchange and the commodities exchanges but also to the company's existing operations MORE
Jul 16, 2012 5:00 AM ETPosted in: Data, Data Communications, fiber-optics, finance, global economy, Internet, networks, The Chartist, World Wide Web -
Mapping the Internet: Emerging markets
For developing nations that can't afford high-cost infrastructure, the solution may be simple: Cut the cord.
By Benjamin Schenkel, contributor
FORTUNE -- It's one thing to bring fiber-optic cable to the coast of a landmass; it's quite another to then build that network into the interior of that landmass. Without much infrastructure already in place, the cost of new broadband cables is extremely high. The result is a bitter irony: Those MORE
Jul 16, 2012 5:00 AM ETPosted in: emerging markets, fiber-optics, finance, global economy, Internet, networks, The Chartist, World Wide Web -
Mapping the Internet: Wiring America
The U.S. has a long way to go before it becomes the world's most connected nation.
By Andrew Blum, contributor
FORTUNE -- The Internet was born in the U.S., but we can hardly claim to have the greatest percentage of citizens online (in fact, we are 23rd, behind Slovakia). Why is that? We're accustomed to thinking the problem is the "last mile," meaning the connection between our phone or cable company's MORE
Jul 16, 2012 5:00 AM ETPosted in: fiber-optics, global economy, Internet, networks, The Chartist, U.S. Internet, World Wide Web -
Mapping the Internet: Undersea cables
Data has a long way to travel across the World Wide Web. It needs a lot of help getting around.
By Andrew Blum, contributor
FORTUNE -- If the Internet is a global phenomenon, it's because there are fiber-optic cables underneath the ocean. Light goes in on one shore and comes out the other, making these tubes the fundamental conduit of information throughout the global village. To make the light travel enormous MORE
Jul 16, 2012 5:00 AM ETPosted in: fiber-optics, global economy, Internet, networks, The Chartist, undersea cables, World Wide Web -
Did AOL just out-Flipboard Flipboard?
The company's new news app aggregates content based on your interests, reading habits and your friends -- and it takes the digital magazine concept to the extreme.
By JP Mangalindan, writer-reporter
FORTUNE -- In the year since Flipboard debuted at last year's Brainstorm Tech conference, the news app space has exploded. Users looking for help sifting through online content have a number to choose from: Pulse, FLUD, Zite, News360, and the recently MORE
Aug 4, 2011 2:55 PM ETPosted in: AOL, App Store, Captain America, Facebook, Flipboard, iPad, social network, Twitter, World Wide Web -
Four things Google needs to do to beat Facebook on the social web
By Ben Elowitz, contributor
Facebook is the social king today, but Google doesn't have to give up on the Internet's future.
FORTUNE -- Google is confronting a series of rugged (and, perhaps, ultimately insurmountable) challenges. And make no mistake: these challenges loom large, because Google's dominance of the Internet landscape is increasingly being threatened by Facebook's rise.
If Google (GOOG) is going to maintain its leadership, still-new CEO Larry Page needs to have MORE
Jun 24, 2011 10:56 AM ETPosted in: Ben Elowitz, Facebook, Google, Microsoft Office, Search, Social web, Vadim Lavrusik, World Wide Web -
Tweet your chart: Why social sharing of medical data is a good idea
Concerns over digital privacy, especially of medical records, have never been higher. Yet startup PatientsLikeMe says there's much to be gained from the crowdsourcing of ailments -- and treatments.
Over a decade ago, Ben Heywood's brother was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease, a fatal neurological disorder. Back then, people didn't post status updates or Tweet about what they had for lunch, let alone share their diagnoses, symptoms and treatments with web-based MORE
Michal Lev-Ram, writer - Dec 17, 2010 5:00 AM ET -
How open government can help states save money
In California, open government collaboration saved $56 million on the state's website redesign project. The lessons learned there could ripple savings across every department -- and every state.
By John F. Moore, contributor
One thing about open government is that there's always more to learn. Carolyn Lawson, Director of eService, Technology Services Governance Division, in California, helped me learn a great deal about how open government efforts were creating jobs in the MORE
Dec 10, 2010 5:23 PM ET -
Is Apple helping kill the Web?
For its 20th anniversary, the man who invented the World Wide Web sounds a warning
Totalitarian governments. Cable monopolies. Magazine smartphone apps. The walled gardens of giant social networking sites. And Apple's (AAPL) iTunes music store.
These are some of the things Tim Berners-Lee, who launched the World Wide Web in December 1990 -- on one of Steve Jobs' NeXT computers, we might add -- cites as threats to its survival.
The Web, MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Nov 19, 2010 11:18 AM ET
