Category Archives: The Industry

AI in Telecom

NVIDIA recently issued its third annual State of AI in Telecommunications report. The company manufacturers many of the cards used in AI data centers, so the company is clearly focused on AI adoption. NVIDIA issues similar reports for other industries.

The 2025 report is the result of a survey that NVIDIA administered to 450 telecom professionals across the globe. The respondents represented a global mix of telecommunications companies, including network operators, system integrators, internet service providers, network equipment providers, independent software vendors, and more. Sixty percent of respondents were executives and directors of companies. The report doesn’t tell us anything about the companies included in the survey but does note that NVIDIA has mostly been concentrating on cellular carriers.

The reason that is important is that I found this survey when somebody online mentioned this report when saying that most telcos have adopted or will soon be adopting AI. The NVIDIA report is fairly careful to say the results represent the views of the 450 respondents, but even NVIDIA occasionally slips up with global statements such as, “97% of telcos are adopting AI. Nearly half are already deploying it”.

Here is how NVIDIA claims AI is being used in telecom:

  • 37% are using AI in network operations and planning.
  • 44% are using AI to optimize the customer experience.
  • 58% are using AI to increase employee productivity.
  • A smaller percentage of respondents are using AI for improved security, customer retention, energy conservation, regulatory compliance, marketing optimization, retail operations, and logistics.
  • 21% say AI has helped them increase revenues by more than 10%, with another 24% saying revenues have increased 5-10%.
  • 11% claim that AI has helped them reduce costs by more than 10%, while another 26% say costs are down 5-10%.
  • 43% say that finding AI experts has been the key obstacle to further AI adoption.

All of this may be true for the largest carriers around the world, but I can’t imagine it is true for the large number of smaller ISPs I know.

I’m curious how many smaller ISPs have done anything serious with AI. It’s hard for anybody to claim they don’t use AI since it is now seemingly built into every online tool in some manner. I’ve talked to a number of folks at ISPs who use AI to help write emails, memos, and reports.

I’d love to hear from folks at small ISPs. Is your ISP using AI for anything like what is described by NVIDIA? That might include things like using AI to chat directly with customers online or using AI to monitor network performance. Everybody I’ve talked to is curious about the potential of AI, but almost universally they aren’t ready to trust it in real-time applications. I’m curious if there is a quiet AI revolution going on at smaller ISPs that I haven’t heard about.

In a few years small ISPs might not have a choice. I have to think that in a few years that many of the software packages that come with network gear will include AI application to monitor performance or troubleshoot problems, but I haven’t heard any claims about that yet from vendors.

Major Outages in 2024

2024 was like most recent years where there were a few major broadband outages and a lot of smaller regional ones. Most carriers claim to be investing more money in increased redundancy to avoid major outages and one hopes that is cutting down on outages.

AT&T suffered a big outage in February when it lost cellular coverage in markets like Dallas Houston, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. The outage particularly affected first responders served by AT&T’s FirstNet network. The company said the outage was “caused by the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network, not a cyberattack” Basically, the company messed something up during a network update.

The biggest telco outages for the year came from hurricanes. In western North Carolina alone, 80% of cell sites went out of service by the day after the storm hit. Fiber networks were severed as entire roads washed away, and something like a million trees were damaged. I live in Asheville, and we experienced a total communications blackout with no cellular or landline broadband. It took about a week to get a partial cell signal back and over three weeks to get broadband. Some rural areas were out much longer.

Hurricane Milton caused broadband outages as well, more related to power outages than destroyed telecom network. A lot of places didn’t lose cell coverage, and most people were back in service within a few days.

The other big outages in 2024 were not network outages but service provider outages.

  • Microsoft Teams had a seven hour outage on January 26. The cause of the outage was never disclosed but seems to have been internal to Microsoft.
  • On March 5, Meta had an outage that blocked users from accessing Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Threads. The reason for the outage was a glitch in the login process.
  • Google lost service for an hour on May 1. The problem was a failure in the verification process that couldn’t identify users.
  • The biggest outage of the year happened on July 19 and affected 8.5 million Microsoft Windows devices. The outage was worldwide. Flights were canceled, customers couldn’t access banks, surgeries were canceled, and there were widespread 911 outages. The cause of the problem was a section of code at CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that many large Windows customers were using to protect their devices. In retrospect, the outage was blamed on the lack of testing from CrowdStrike before implementing a software update.
  • Microsoft had an outage on November 25 that caused intermittent inability for users to use Outlook or reach the web. Microsoft admitted the source of the problem was a configuration change – another software update problem.
  • On December 11, OpenAI had an outage of it’s video service Sora. This was caused by a cascading error when a telemetry service overwhelmed the platform.

Interestingly, most of the service outages were the result of configuration changes, meaning software upgrades.

These big companies should learn a lesson from smaller telcos. I’ve had many clients who learned the hard way to never introduce new software onto customers without first testing the update. That means NEVER EVER, NEVER EVER, NEVER EVER (did I say that enough?). Many telcos have software test labs where they have a lab setup that mimics the network. They try updates in the test lab before ever subjecting their customers to an untested update. This is software update 101 stuff, but apparently, the smart guys at some of the biggest companies don’t think they need to take this extra precaution.

The Cost of Overbuilding

Some big ISPs have big plans for more fiber expansion. I gleaned the following planned future fiber passings from various quotes from the ISPs in the second half of 2024. These ISPs have plans to build the following fiber passings by the end of 2029 or sooner.

  • AT&T – 21 million
  • T-Mobile/ Metronet – 3.5 million
  • T-Mobile/Lumos – 3.4 million
  • Frontier – 3 million
  • Brightspeed – 1.7 million
  • Verizon – 1.5 million
  • Cox – 1 million

These numbers don’t count the plans of numerous smaller fiber overbuilders that have aggressive expansion plans.

The magnitude of these numbers amaze me because of the history of fiber overbuilding. The two biggest overbuilders have been Verizon FiOS and AT&T. Both companies have always been extremely cost-conscious in deciding where to build fiber.

Verizon was famous for its discipline about where it built FiOS. The company clearly had an internal cost target, and the D.C. suburbs are a patchwork of neighboring subdivisions with and without FiOS that can only be explained by looking at the cost per passing to build the fiber.

AT&T has done the same. I’ve followed AT&T’s expansion in various communities, and the company has built fiber over the last five years where the cost to do so was the lowest. A lot of the AT&T expansion was done by overlashing fiber onto existing copper telephone wires.

A few of the companies on the list above are following that same model. It seems likely that as Frontier and Brightspeed extend fiber in the legacy telephone areas, they will first build the areas with the lowest cost. I will not be surprised to find in a few years that these companies have built only those parts of communities where the construction costs are the lowest. That kind of discipline is the best use of limited capital dollars. Cox and other cable companies have the same option to expand fiber by overlashing on existing cables.

The expansion plan by AT&T perplexes me. Jeff McElfresh, AT&T’s chief operating officer was quoted in Fierce Network in December saying that the company has 29 million fiber passings at the end of 2024 and plans to grow to 50 million by the end of 2029.

It seems likely to me that the 29 million existing fiber passings were mostly done in neighborhoods with the lowest costs in the AT&T footprint. In my own city I’ve driven around and looked at AT&T’s claimed fiber passings, and most are overlashed onto copper wires. I assume AT&T has been using an expansion metric that considers the availability of overlashing plus the density of homes.

Over the years I’ve heard many folks who believe that the big ISPs build strictly based on demographics – and perhaps that is the third part of the AT&T equation on where to build. But I see AT&T fiber in neighborhoods with huge homes as well those with small bungalows. At least in this city, it looks like construction cost is more important than demographics.

Every overbuilder has its own business model and a target construction cost. I know smaller overbuilders who say they can’t make a business case if construction costs are more than $3,000 per passing. For years, AT&T and Verizon touted overbuilding costs below $1,000 per passing.

It seems to me that for AT&T to meet its target of 50 million passings it is now willing to spend more per passing than in the past. Perhaps that willingness is based on the success the company has in converting customers to fiber in overbuilt neighborhoods. It also seems likely that the company is banking on the economy of scale savings from increasing the size of the fiber business. AT&T now has a new motivation, which is to cut folks off copper to cut down on maintenance and backoffice costs. Maybe the net savings from shutting down copper networks is the new factor in the AT&T metrics for where to build fiber.

Only AT&T knows the details behind its decision to expand rapidly. I find it interesting that the company is suddenly willing to build fiber in neighborhoods that were not in its plans just a few years ago.

Nobody Overbuilds Fiber

Ten years ago, I routinely told clients that nobody builds fiber to overbuild an established fiber network. And at the time it was true except for a few well-known examples. For example, when Google Fiber went to neighborhoods in the Research Triangle in North Carolina and in Austin, Texas, both the incumbent telco and cable company both reacted by building fiber. I know a few folks that live in those areas today, and they have the choice of three fiber providers.

Apparently, a lot of fiber overbuilders are now overbuilding existing fiber networks. RVA LLC recently published a report that said that there were 10.4 million new fiber passings built in the country in the year ending September 2023, but that only 8.4 million were to homes that didn’t already have fiber. That means there were 2 million fiber passings built in 2024 that are competing with another fiber provider. And I assume most of these passings also compete with a cable company, except for the cases where the existing fiber provider is a cable company.

Anybody building a second fiber clearly thinks they can be profitable. I’ve never looked at a business plan for somebody who is going to compete against both fiber and a cable company, but I have to assume they have a reasonably low breakeven penetration goal in mind in a market with three or more providers.

The chance to be competitive and successful with a new network comes down to cost per passing. In neighborhoods with aerial utilities, the incumbent telco and cable company have a huge cost advantage over anybody else because of the ability to overlash fiber onto existing wires. AT&T cited numbers to investors for years of spending $600 or less on fiber per new passing – a number that a new overbuilder can’t touch.

Incumbents also have an another advantage because they already have customers to move to fiber. Folks are often surprised when our surveys often find that telcos often still have a 10% – 15% penetration of DSL in many urban areas. Those DSL customers are likely thrilled to be moved to a faster product – usually with little or no change in price.

In the same survey cited above, RVA LLC says that cable companies typically lose about 33% market share to a fiber overbuilder. The math doesn’t seem to leave a lot of market share for a third overbuilder, unless they have some major advantage like really low prices. A second fiber provider has no speed advantage.

It’s also likely that much of the new national fiber passings come from passing MDUs, where building fiber on one street passes a lot of potential customers. A decade ago, a lot of fiber overbuilders avoided MDUs because the cost to string fiber in older buildings was exorbitant. But over time the industry has developed low-cost techniques for stringing fiber in hallways, and MDUs are now sought after instead of avoided.

I’d be curious to hear from somebody who knows how the market penetration rates settle out in a 3-provider market. Can each provider make money in the long run, particularly since this kind of market is likely to see fierce price competition?

It’s clearly no longer true that nobody overbuilds fiber, with 20% of fiber passings in 2023 built over existing fiber. I still have a hard time promoting the idea of overbuilding fiber. The ISPs I work with tend to be smaller and are leery of any new market with extra risk. But maybe overbuilding fiber isn’t a bad strategy for an ISP who is confident of its ability to sell. I would love to hear from somebody who thinks overbuilding fiber with fiber is a winning strategy.

What About Competition?

In comments made to the FCC in the recent docket looking at customer service practices, the California Public Utility Commission filed comments that said that big ISPs don’t focus on customer service because they don’t have to. The CPUC said that only 26% of California residents have a choice between two fast ISPs.

The federal government has been concentrating on making sure that homes have at least one fast option for broadband, and that’s an obviously good goal at a time when Internet access is considered by most households to be a necessity.

But the numbers cited by the CPUC are not unusual. Across the country there are still a lot of places where homes and businesses have only one fast ISP option.

There are real consequences for any neighborhood that has only one fast ISP. Such neighborhoods have no competitive options, and the one fast ISP is effectively a broadband monopoly in that community. There are clearly documented consequences of being served by an ISP that has a virtual monopoly.

The best way to think about that is to look instead at what happens when a community gets real competition between two or more ISPs that offer gigabit speeds.

  • Lower Prices. The conventional wisdom is that competition lowers prices by at least 15%. In today’s world of competing for customers with lower prices and specials, a lot of households are seeing much bigger discounts by playing two ISPs off against each other. As someone who has been in the industry for a long time, this reminds of the marketing battles in the 1990s by long distance companies. Customers learned they could get cheaper rates by calling and saying they got a better rate from another carrier.
  • Improved Customer Service. When a new competitor moves into an area that was previously a monopoly, it’s almost inevitable that the original monopoly ISP will step up its game. Improved customer service means the ISP will respond to customer outages and troubles more quickly. They may even show up on time for home visit appointments.
  • Technology Upgrades. ISPs operating in a competitive market tend to upgrade technology a lot sooner than in non-competitive markets. If nothing else, the original monopoly provider will usually tweak the network to work better. For example, every cable company can improve performance by tightening up frequency leaks in the network. When faced with competition, crews seem to suddenly find the time to do long-ignored maintenance.

A lot of cities were disappointed when they learned that BEAD funds would be deployed almost entirely in rural areas and wouldn’t benefit cities. Early press releases made it sound like BEAD could be used to help neighborhoods served by old incumbent networks, but it quickly became clear that BEAD was not going to be allowed for that purpose.

Most cities are still acutely aware that technology differences in their city that are creating competition haves and have-nots. The consequences for neighborhoods with only a single legacy monopoly provider can be dire in a city where everybody else is served by both a cable company and a fiber overbuilder.

A lot of the competition gap will be fixed as ISPs continue to build fiber networks. AT&T and other largest ISPs have announced plans to build over 60 million fiber passings by the end of 2030. Not all of that is new passings since millions of fiber passings will compete with another fiber provider, but this construction will improve competition in many communities. Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait until 2030 to see who gets left behind.

The Continued Growth of Fiber

The Fiber Broadband Association announced the results of a fiber deployment survey from RVA LLC Market Research & Consulting. That firm has been tracking the deployment of fiber across the U.S. for many years. The survey was for the year ending in September 2024.

The survey reports the following:

  • ISPs built fiber to pass 10.3 million homes in the last year, a new all-time high. That includes 8.4 million new passings that got fiber and 1.9 million passings that got an additional fiber connection.
  • RVA estimates that fiber now passes 56.5% of U.S. homes.
  • Fiber ISPs are increasing penetration rates on fiber over time, with an overall take rate of 45%. ISPs are achieving a 20% penetration more quickly than in the past.
  • RVA claims that cable company penetration rates in fiber neighborhoods have fallen by 33%, with the other new fiber passings coming from customers that previously had DSL or other technologies.

The remaining fiber market is still immense, with almost 149 million homes that don’t have fiber. RVA estimates this at:

  • Densely populated mid to high-income areas – 90.6 million.
  • Densely populated low-income areas – 21.5 million.
  • Small towns / rural – 29.2 million.
  • Second homes – 7.3 million.

The following graph from RVA that shows fiber construction over time is interesting.

The early fiber growth from 2005 – 2008 mostly came from Verizon FiOS. No other large ISPs climbed on the fiber wagon for many years. The fall-off of fiber construction during the pandemic is dramatic, with over 3 million fewer new homes being passed with fiber in 2020.

There are a lot of different entities building fiber. The biggest market share is held buy the large telcos and their affiliates (63.8%). Next comes smaller tier 2 and 3 telcos (11.6%), fiber overbuilders (10.2%), cable companies (9.3%), municipalities (2.7%), and electric cooperatives (2.4%).

A New Source of Broadband Funding

The Eliminating Barriers to Rural Internet Development Grant Eligibility (E-BRIDGE) Act, was signed into law in early January as part of the ‘larger Thomas R. Carper Water Resources Development Act of 2024 (S. 4367).

This bill authorizes the Economic Development Administration (EDA), which is part of the Department of Commerce, to award economic development grants to public-private partnerships or related consortiums to implement broadband infrastructure projects. The goal of any funded project must be to provide, extend, expand, or improve high-speed broadband service through (1) planning, technical assistance, or training; (2) land acquisition or development; or (3) acquisition, construction, or improvement of facilities.

Then grants must be used in underserved markets. EDA doesn’t necessarily use the same definition that is used for other grants like BEAD where unserved refers to the speed of existing broadband. Instead, the EDA definition of underserved means communities where a lot of people don’t have broadband.

It’s not a large grant program. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that about six projects will qualify in the first year, with the number of projects climbing to fifteen in 2028. CBO estimates that the average award will be about $1.5 million per project. For anybody who has ever worked with EDA broadband grants, this estimated timeline shows the typically long process to get EDA funding. These grants aren’t obtained by a competitive process. Instead, ideas for new projects bubble up from the economic development agencies in communities where EDA is already engaged in other work.

As the expected size of the grants show, the projects funded from these grants will not be used to build large broadband networks. Instead, the broadband will likely be part of projects that are bringing a new factory or building low-income homes.

EDA has been awarding broadband grants for many years. The grants always are awarded in communities with high levels of poverty or that are considered to be economically distressed. That doesn’t always mean rural areas and EDA often works in towns that have a locally bad economy.

The change made by this new law allows EDA to work directly with public-private partnerships on projects. In the past, EDA had to work directly with communities, and those communities often had to do legal gymnastics to include a private ISP in a project. Under this new law, EDA can award funding directly to public-private partnerships, and those entities can own the constructed networks. This should make it a lot easier for communities to find projects that can be successful.

While this is a relatively small program, it hopefully reminds folks that broadband grant funding is not going to end with BEAD. If you’ve been reading this blog, you know that I predict there will still be millions of rural homes without broadband after the dust of BEAD and RDOF settle. Programs like this, and perhaps a newly funded ReConnect grant program will hopefully tackle some of the areas that are left behind. The bigger hope is that States will step up with grants to finally close the rural digital divide. Many State grant programs existed before BEAD, and state legislators are likely to pay attention to constituents who still don’t have broadband.

Comcast and Charter Stocks Drop

The stock market punished Charter and Charter last week after the two companies reported small customer losses in the fourth quarter of 2024.

First the facts. Charter reported a loss of 177,000 broadband customers. With a customer base of almost 30.1 million customers at the end of 3Q 2024, that’s a 0.59% loss of customers – just over one-half of one percent. The stock market reacted by dropping Charter stock from $361.22 to $326.78 – a drop of 10%.

Comcast reported a loss of 139,000 broadband customers. With a customer base of over 31.8 million customers at the end of 3Q 2024, that’s a 0.44% loss of customers – less than one-half of one percent. The stock market reacted by dropping Comcast stock from $37.54 to $32.58 – a drop of 13%.

On the surface, this seems like an extreme overreaction to small losses. Textbook stock valuations would not concentrate on something like the customer counts but on overall earnings. Consider Charter, which released its fourth-quarter earnings. While the company lost 177,000 broadband customers, Charter also:

  • Added 529,000 cellular customers in 4Q 2024.
  • Fourth-quarter revenues are up 1.6% over the previous year.
  • Fourth-quarter EBITDA was up 3.4% from the previous year.
  • Charter bought back $1.3 billion of its shares, which is supposed to increase stock value.
  • On the bad news side, Charter lost 1.23 million cable TV customers during 2024, a trend that has been happening for years. That’s a little higher than the 1 million cable customers lost in 2023.

Comcast results are similar for the fourth quarter. In addition to losing 139,000 broadband customers,

  • Comcast added 307,000 cellular customers in 4Q 2024.
  • Fourth-quarter revenues are up 0.2% over the previous year.
  • Fourth-quarter EBITDA was up 3.5% from the previous year.
  • On the bad news side, Comcast lost 1.58 million cable TV customers during 2024. That’s an improvement over the 2 million cable customers lost in 2023.

Perhaps the drops are recognition of the long-term trajectories for cable companies. Both companies told investors in 2024 that they had weathered the storm to offset losses due to FWA wireless. However, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon had another great quarter and added 960,000 FWA customers.

Cable companies are also seeing increased competition from fiber overbuilding. RWA LLC recently issued a report that fiber overbuilders passed 10.3 million total homes for the year ended September 30, 2024. Over 9% of that new fiber is being built by cable companies. RVA says that in neighborhoods where fiber has been in place for several years, cable companies lose an average of 33% of their customers.

It’s actually amazing that the cable companies have maintained customers over last year while fending off FWA and fiber overbuilding. The fact that customer losses are small is a success story. However, there is a darker side to the story – they’ve kept customers by cutting prices. While Charter and Comcast both had broadband rate increases in 2024, both have been keeping customers by lowering rates.

It’s likely that the size of the stock price drops were exaggerated due to the craziness that happens in markets in times of economic uncertainty. These are not the only companies getting punished in the stock market. But maybe this is an overdue adjustment due to changes in the underlying fundamentals of the businesses.

What Does Unlimited Mean?

It’s always entertaining and informative when the big ISPs fight with each other. One recent battle comes from Verizon filing a complaint with the National Advertising Division (NAD) of the Better Business Bureau.

Verizon complained about Charter advertising that touted its cellular service as unlimited. Charter has been marketing both an Unlimited and Unlimited Plus cellular plan, and the advertisement for these plans implies that customers can use as much voice, data and texts as they want. The very name Unlimited implies to the average customer that there is no cap on usage.

As you would expect, this isn’t exactly true, and none of the cellular carriers, including Verizon, has a truly unlimited cellular data plan. In Charter’s case, data speeds are severely restricted once a customer reaches a monthly cap. There are also other limitations on data usage, such as the amount that can be used for tethering during a month.

The dispute went to NAD since the big carriers have all agreed to use NAD as the arbiter of disputes about advertising claims. This saves the carriers from taking each other to court, and the carriers all accept decisions made by NAD.

Interestingly, NAD decided that the Charter plans are unlimited since customers never get cut off entirely from using data. However, NAD asked Charter to fix its advertising to disclose that there are limitations placed on data usage after reaching a cap.

This particular tussle between Verizon and Charter is typical of the disputes that have been forwarded to NAD over the years. The telcos and cable companies keep a close watch on each other, and complaints are lodged when a carrier makes exaggerated marketing claims.

I predict we’ll see an uptick in advertising disputes as carriers react to being freed from regulation. The FCC clearly no longer regulates broadband as a result of the Sixth Circuit ruling that killed Title II regulation. My guess is this will embolden ISPs and cellular carriers to push the envelope in their advertising to the public.

There are some regulations that will stay on the books. For example, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act created broadband labels, and the FCC can’t kill that requirement without action from Congress. But most ISPs have already buried these where customers can’t easily find them.

Who Owns the Internet?

A recent article published by the Russian Foreign Affairs Council (RFAC) claimed that some of organizations that engage in Internet governance have a clear U.S. bias.  ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) responded, saying the claims are false. This all sounds like worldwide politics in action, but it raises a good question – who owns the Internet?

There is no easy answer to that question. One question that can be answered is who owns the physical infrastructure of the Internet. The answer is every ISP or government that owns wired or wireless infrastructure that connects to users. The network bringing you the broadband to read this blog is part of the Internet. The biggest ISPs in the world own the lion’s share of Internet infrastructure. The ten largest ISPs are Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, Charter Communications, Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Orange, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), and KDDI. Infrastructure also means the undersea cables which are owned by a diverse set of investors, governments, and large data users like Meta and Google.

The other key component of the Internet are the hub sites where traffic is transferred between ISPs. The owners of the hubs around the world include ISPs, real estate investors, and governments.

The other big investment in the Internet is for the servers that house the data being transmitted. All ISPs own a few servers, but just in the U.S. there are some giant server farms such as those owned by Amazon (1.5 million), Microsoft (4 million), Google (900,000), and Facebook (30,000).

However, all of this infrastructure is not the Internet, just the infrastructure behind the Internet. There are organizations that define and promote standards for the Internet. This includes the World Wide Web Consortium (WC3) which defines standards for websites. ICANN coordinates and maintains key databases needed for routing traffic. There are others, including the Internet Assigned Numbers Association (IANA), the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Internet Architecture Board (IAB), Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), and the IEEE Standards Association. Each of these organizations plays a role in regulating the Internet through the development of standards or maintaining databases.

The hardest question to answer is who owns the data sent over the Internet – since that is the ultimate commodity that makes this all work. Data is owned by several groups. The largest is probably the data-producing platforms like Meta, Google, Microsoft, and governments like in China. End users with their own servers own their own data, although it’s always been believed that ISPs and others snag most data that is unencrypted.

The original question I posed is who owns the Internet. I think the best answer is that it’s mostly owned by a group of giant companies and a few governments. Some own most of the infrastructure, others own the hubs, and others control the data. To counter the allegations made by the Russian Foreign Affairs Council, it’s hard to say that anybody controls the Internet.