A company that once pitched itself as extraterritorial now measures success by how deeply it is wired into national jurisdictions. That’s a notable political shift from seeing itself as literally above the law to trying to become the law.
Many years ago I was invited into a high security windowless room on the Facebook campus. After multiple physical security checks and pat-downs, and being escorted into the room, I found myself among ex-military advisors plotting “Aquila” drones. It was 100% clear that Facebook delivering “Internet” over contested ground from a neighboring country was privatized military intelligence. I couldn’t get out of there and take a shower fast enough.
I called it intelligence collection by elevated platform in 2018, when the NTSB brief was three months old.
As those Air Force mercenaries soon discovered the drones were never above the law, and Facebook in 2016 failed before Aquila ever finished a test flight.
I’m not a lawyer but sovereign airspace has no altitude ceiling. The U-2-reminiscent platform plan for 90K ft still needs the same national spectrum license as a tower on the ground. The ITU identified spectrum for high-altitude platforms, and every country licenses that spectrum on its own terms. India’s regulator proved the point in February 2016 by banning Free Basics on zero-rating grounds. Nothing physical had to be blocked when Facebook lost at the licensing layer. Four months later Aquila’s first full-scale flight ended in a structural failure on final approach near Yuma, flying without an airworthiness certificate, and the second flight in 2017 did not solve the underlying problem, which also stalled Zephyr: a solar airframe cannot carry a useful payload and survive the night at anything but equatorial latitudes. Loon, the balloon program, closed in January 2021 when Alphabet could find no commercial case for it.
Inside the high walls of the Facebook campus it was like humanity didn’t matter, money-fueled madness made anything possible (e.g. Musk’s “occupy Mars” is a campaign to abolish laws and replace with an Emperor). Outside, the laws broke every power-hungry fantasy. That’s why Facebook shut the airframe program in June 2018 and said Airbus would build the aircraft instead (e.g. Tesla initially had Lotus build its cars to avoid itself having to operate within the law); and that partnership faded quietly.
Fast forward to today and Meta has announced an engineering nothing-burger. This is a political science post, without technical significance, dressed up as something engineers did. Meta stopped trying to route around states and started embedding in them instead. It plans to land in France with Orange as landing party, which puts Meta inside French critical-infrastructure policy, inside French lawful-intercept obligations, and at the table when governments talk about cable protection. That is a far more politically durable position than hoping nobody touches an aircraft too fragile to survive its landing.
Colonization by cable is probably the right way to read the news, if you consider history. Paris learned what happened in the Fashoda Crisis of 1898 from a British telegram routed through Cairo, and when Britain censored the cables during the Boer War the next year, France started building a state-owned network to Africa.
The two major colonial powers sought to link their colonies via a vast railway network: Britain from Cairo to Cape Town, and France from Dakar to Djibouti. The town of Fashoda, situated at the intersection of these two planned lines, became a critical focal point for both armies. On September 18, 1898, Marchand’s French mission and Kitchener’s British expedition came face to face on the Upper Nile. Ordered to withdraw, France yielded and was forced to acknowledge British authority over the entire Nile basin. This defeat led to a redivision of African colonies between the British and the French.
Ask yourself what will Meta censor for Trump when the EU goes to war?
On the current cable at Le Porge Meta holds more than 80%, Orange gets two of sixteen fiber pairs for landing it, and the ownership split is not public.
Guess why it’s not public. On the US side the FCC landing license for Amitié went to Microsoft, and since 2020 the FCC refers cable landing applications with foreign ownership to a Justice Department-led committee that can condition the license on a national security agreement. Whatever the licensee agreed to in Washington is part of the deal France landed.
Petal goes to NEC and Sumitomo, two years after the French state bought 80% of Alcatel Submarine Networks to keep cable building sovereign, and seven years after the Senate warned in 2019 that these infrastructures must not be held exclusively by foreign entities.
France keeps one thing. Le Monde reported in 2014 from the Snowden files that Orange’s landing stations give the DGSE access to everything transiting the country, sorted by origin.
Meta owns the cable. France owns the landing and reads it. That is the same arrangement France rejected in 1898, with the tap as consolation, and good luck to France when it remembers why.
