这确实正在发生。《华尔街日报》报道说，Facebook、谷歌、亚马逊和微软等主要的互联网公司正在慢慢地购买大量的互联网基础设施。这让传统的电信公司（传统上是他们在控制线路）感到很紧张。

我们所说的也不是这里一条线路那里一条线路。通过新收购的一个机器人团队的帮助，Google现在拥有全世界超过10万英里长的私有光缆线路。电信公司Sprint也只拥有4万英里。Facebook刚刚在欧洲安装完巨大的高容量网络，把欧洲和它在瑞典的Arctic数据中心链接起来。这家公司还刚刚投资几百万美元来铺设一条6000英里长的跨太平洋线路。与此同时，亚马逊在购买光纤网络上花费的钱上涨了44%，达到260亿美元，而微软也建立了自己的网络并且投资海底线缆。

大家都在做！在全球范围内建设光缆网络对于这些不缺钱的网络巨头来说也是非常昂贵的，但只有通过这种方法他们才能控制带宽费用。在过去，电信公司能够随心所欲地收费，现在宽带费用正在稳步下降，因此没有理由说电信公司能继续控制下去。拥有自己的基础设施也意味着互联网公司可以更好地控制向用户提供的内容的质量。他们还希望用户不会离开，因为如果网络质量很差，网站登录会很慢。一家出售光缆的公司的CEO丹·卡鲁索说，“这是为了把握自己命运”。

但最大的问题是，这会不会最终影响到我们。在近期，更多的光缆和更宽的贷款也许是个好消息，价钱还可能很便宜。但在一二十年以后，整个互联网可能都是由互联网公司运营的，那么就不知道他们会做什么事了。即便如此，改善互联网服务也不会很难。毕竟，电信公司和ISP才是我们最痛恨的公司。

译者：林杉

百度新闻与新华网国际频道合作稿件，转载请注明出处。

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Facebook and Google Are Buying Up the Cables That Carry the Internet

It can get a little bit annoying when people ramble on about how Facebook and Google are taking over the world. They're just websites! But when those websites start to buy up other things, say, the very cables that connect the people of the world—well that's actually pretty alarming.

It's also happening. The Wall Street Journal reports that major web companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Microsoft have been slowly buying up significant portions of the internet infrastructure. This is making the major telecom companies—who have traditionally controlled the cables—very nervous.

We're not talking a wire here and a wire there, either. In addition to the small army of robots they just bought, Google now owns over 100,000 miles of private fiber optic routes around the world. (For point of comparison, Sprint owns just 40,000.) Facebook just finished installing a massive high capacity network throughout Europe that links back to its massive Arctic data center in Sweden. The social network also just invested millions to help lay a 6,000-mile-long cable across the Pacific. Meanwhile, Amazon's spending on infrastructure is up 44 percent to $2.6 billion as it buys up more fiber networks, as Microsoft builds its own networks and invests in underwater cables.

Everybody's doing it! Stringing new fiber optic cables around the globe is a major investment even for these multibillion dollar conglomerates, but that's how they can control how much they're paying for bandwidth. In the past, the major telecom companies have been free to charge what they like, and while bandwidth costs have been declining steadily, there's no guarantee that this trend will continue. Owning the infrastructure also means that the internet companies serving up content to consumers will also keep a firm grip on quality. The last thing they want is users to flee because a crappy network is causing their sites to run slow. As Dan Caruso, CEO of a company that sells fiber to these internet giants, put it to WSJ, "It's really about controlling their own destiny."

The big question, at this point, is whether or not this is going to affect you. In the short term, it's probably good news as more cables mean more bandwidth, probably at cheaper prices. A decade or two from now, though, we could be looking at an internet that's mostly owned by internet companies and who knows how these companies will run things differently. That said, it can't be too hard to improve internet service. After all, telecom companies and ISPs are the most loathed companies out there. [WSJ]