Geopolitics Submarine Cables The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)

Baltic Blow-Up

By Dan Schiller

Attempts to project dominance over the Baltic Sea have recurred for hundreds of years, as rival states have vied with one another over economic and military supremacy. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992, the Baltic has again become a conflict zone. After the collapse of German Democratic Republic in 1989 and the reunification of Germany the next year; and the accession of Poland, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia to NATO during the 1990s and early 2000s, followed by the accession of Finland in 2023 and Sweden in 2024, the Baltic has been – nearly – encircled by NATO.   But for Russia. 

A tiny Russian exclave, Kaliningrad, fronts onto the Baltic, while Russia itself enjoys direct access via three additional ports located on the Gulf of Finland: Primorsk, Ust-Luga and St. Petersburg. Even as the US has sanctioned Russia’s fuel exports, supplies of Russian oil and liquified natural gas are being shipped across the Baltic to varied destinations.[1]

This contributes to making this sea one of the world’s busiest waterways, with 70,000 vessels sailing annually through the Oresund – the strait at the western end of the Baltic between Denmark and Sweden, through which ships then pass into the North Sea and ultimately into the Atlantic Ocean.[2] The combination of NATO oversight, heightened US policing of submarine cables across the world,[3] and Russian fuel shipments is turning the shallow Baltic into a fraught zone.

Indeed, the drama over undersea cables has recently become intense. Somewhere in the world, two to four undersea cables break every week, on average – usually because of ships’ anchors, fishing gear, or natural disasters.[4] Reports have circulated during recent months, however, purporting to trace at least four cable breaks in the Baltic back to sabotage. Given the world’s dependence on undersea cables to carry everything from social media messages to enormous financial transfers, these outages have been heavily publicized.

In each case, NATO countries have blamed Russia or China.  Finland and Germany have separately detained and boarded ships they suspect of deliberately damaging data and power cables with their anchors; a Norwegian military university researcher has pronounced that the cable infrastructure “presents an attractive target” and that there are credible accounts of sabotage around the world[5]; Germany’s defense minister leveled a charge of “hybrid” warfare against Russia.[6] NATO itself quickly assembled military assets to protect the seabed infrastructure under a new program called Baltic Sentry.[7]

However, did these incidents actually testify to a threat mounted by adversaries – or were they more routine cable-breaks? US intelligence officials asserted late in November 2024 that the two cable cuts reported by then were not deliberate acts, though European authorities had not discounted sabotage.[8] Despite the additional two ruptures since then, uncertainty remains.  The Washington Post reported on January 19, 2025 that several senior US and European intelligence officials believed that the cables had been severed by accident. Investigations by the US and a half-dozen European security services had turned up “no indication” that commercial ships suspected of dragging their anchors across seabed cables had done so intentionally – let alone at Moscow’s behest.  “Instead,” the Post related, “U.S. and European officials said that the evidence gathered to date – including intercepted communications and other classified intelligence – points to accidents caused by inexperienced crews serving aboard poorly maintained vessels.”[9] In other words, business as usual.

Despite this, NATO has mobilized to create a new power complex to monitor and repel perceived threats to the Baltic Sea’s cable infrastructure. And so the US struggle to control global communications expands, now into northern latitudes. 

[1] Vaibhav Raghunandan and Petras Katinas, “December 2024-Monthly Analysis of Russian Fossil Fuel Exports and Sanctions,” Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, January 10, 202; Malte Humpert, “Russia’s Gazprom Sends Baltic LNG Through Arctic Avoiding Africa Detour,” gCaptain, September 10, 2024.

[2] Michael North, The Baltic: A History (Cambridge: Harvard, 2015), 320-21; Elisabeth Braw, “Russia’s Shadow Fleet Is Putting Danish Waters in Danger,” Foreign Policy, March 26, 2024,

[3] Winston Qiu, “US and its Allies Issue Joint Statement on the Security and Resilience of Undersea Cables,” Submarine Cable Networks, October 7, 2024.

[4] Lane Burdette, “What To Know About Submarine Cable Breaks,” Telegeography,  November 21, 2024.

[5] James Glanz, Elian Peltier and Pablo Robles, “Undersea Surgeons,” New York Times, November 29, 2024; Baltic Sea could be deliberate act: Norwegian premier,” Anadolu Agency 30 December 2024; Melissa Eddy and Johanna Lemola, ”Severing of Baltic Sea Cables Was ‘Sabotage,’ Germany Says,” New York Times, November 19, 2024.

[7] Julian Borger, “NATO flotilla assembles off Estonia to protect undersea cables in Baltic Sea,” The Guardian, January 19, 2025.

[8] James Glanz, Elian Peltier and Pablo Robles, “Undersea Surgeons,” New York Times,  November 29, 2024; also, see Max Colchester and Bojan Pancevski, “The Deep-Sea Battle Over the World’s Data Cables Is Heating Up,” Wall Street Journal, January 23, 2025; Richard Milne, “Baltic Sea data cable damaged in latest case of potential sabotage,” Financial Times, January 26, 2025.

[9] Greg Miller, Robyn Dixon and Isaac Stanley-Becker, “Accidents, not Russian Sabotage, behind undersea cable damage, officials say,” Washington Post,  January 19, 2025.

Libraries Working Class

Academic Libraries in Class Society

By Yeo and Schiller

[Editor’s note (10/3/2024) Please see the comment below for additional historical context about Queens College]

A shocking disparity defines the US system of information provision.  At one extreme is the multi-trillion-dollar corporate wealth of the for-profit information industry. At the other end is the growing – and deliberately inflicted – poverty of our public information sector.  During the past half-century, capital and class together have gravely worsened this disparity.

Scholars have analyzed the depredations visited by the for-profit information industry on the information sphere in general, and libraries in particular. Corporations have enclosed and raided governmental and other public information sites, while doing everything in their power to vilify the belief that information is, and should be, a social good.[1] A recent appellate court decision to ban the Internet Archive from lending out digital copies of half a million books to the public is only the latest troubling example.[2]

Concomitantly, libraries have faced declining budgets which have forced them to significantly hollow out collection development and other public services and relinquish their traditional functions to for-profit database providers and publishers – at the same time expanding and highlighting rare and precious special archival collections to prospective donors and possible political allies as if this is the sole function of libraries.

However, a closely related second factor has also been at work: a class logic. According to Mary Jane Petrowski, associate director at the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL),[3] between 2012 and 2021, 31% of full-time librarian positions, 54% of all other paid full-time staff, have been lost in community colleges. At colleges that offer Baccalaureate and Masters degrees, 34.2% of full-time librarian positions, 55.4% of all other full-time staff have disappeared. For universities that grant PhD degrees, by contrast, the number of full-time librarians has actually increased by 13.7% (while all other full-time staff has dropped 21.7%).

Community college libraries serving mostly working-class students, in other words, have been gutted. Eliminating more than 30% of librarian positions and 50% of staff over a decade means that these libraries find it difficult to remain open.[4] And within colleges that offer Baccalaureate and Masters degrees, there is a comparable disparity. For instance, Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY), has only 9 full-time librarians including cataloging and special collections librarians serving about 16,500 overwhelmingly working-class students[5] – among them 48% are first-generation college students.[6] Since 2019, the library has lost 10 full-time librarian positions to retirement and departure. These positions remain unfilled. Thus, the library is struggling to provide adequate public services like reference and instruction, and is only able to cover the bare minimum of collection development for many subject areas – 30 out of the 58 subjects defined by the library as needed to support dozens of majors, minors, and programs have no subject specialist assigned.[7]

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Anti-Trust Laws Competition Google Monopoly

A Paradox: Corporate Power Increases As Corporate Competition Grows

By Yeo and Schiller

This is the first of an intermittent series that will focus on the growing need to impose limits on corporate power in communications and on the communications market as a whole.  In the current moment of right-wing mobilization and social polarization, it will also be important to try to examine some of the Left’s assumptions about its reliance on communications systems.

*

On 6 August 2024, Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that Google had maintained a monopoly in search, and therefore violated U.S. antitrust law. [1] Google said it would appeal the ruling.

After more than two decades of promoting neoliberal policies of unregulated growth for the internet sector, antitrust activism has revived among policymakers, think tanks, and academics.[2]  Starting at the tail-end of the Trump administration and continuing under the Biden administration, the U.S. government has renewed anti-monopoly investigations to rein in the tech giants. The government has sued four of them: Amazon, Google (twice), Apple, and Meta.[3] This has been welcomed across the political spectrum.

These anti-trust actions, according to Lina Khan, Chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), are “part of protecting the free market [to] ensur[e] that market outcomes – who wins and who loses – [are] determined by fair competition rather than by private gatekeepers who can serve as de-facto private regulators.”[4] This argument is rooted in neo-classical economics: The FTC asserts that the current market requires correction because it has “deviated” from “fair” competition, as would exist in a “perfect” market.  This view resonates among those who, on the left, embrace a critique of “monopoly capital.” [5]

This renewal of antitrust is to be welcomed, even if it is undertaken for an inadequate reason.  A stronger rationale for mounting a political attack against the titans of the internet would be anchored not in neoclassical economics but, rather, in a sweeping critique of corporate power. Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple and the rest are bad actors for a panoply of reasons. Economically, they stomp all over smaller businesses, whether customers (e.g., advertisers) or suppliers (e.g., news media). Politically, they damage democracy through lobbying, government contracts and other means. Culturally, they saturate us with commercialism, pushing away alternatives. Environmentally, their mammoth data centers force the pace of global heating. In addition to all this, their business model is built upon privacy transgressions, as it surveils and channels individuals as corporate preferences demand.

We should welcome vigorous antitrust policies, therefore, inasmuch as these make it more difficult for the tech companies to continue to have free rein, even if these policies are not based on a far-reaching critique of corporate power – and even if, paradoxically, in the real world of contemporary capitalism, corporate competition has actually intensified.

For, contrary to many accounts, corporate competition has not lessened but increased, alongside the financialization and transnationalization of the political economy. Without a clearer understanding of how competition is structured within the larger framework of today’s capitalism, we won’t be able to strategize on how to limit corporate power – via antitrust or other, more comprehensive means.

Competition is a consequence of capital’s inherent drive for profitable expansion.[6] It is in turn the feature of capitalism that spurs technological change, the search for new markets, and the re-organization of labor to be as productive as possible. In the process of competing, firms may temporarily ally with competitors out of corporate self-interest, to maximize profits.

The intensity of competition often is presumed to correspond to the number of firms in a given industry; if that number is small, then it is supposed to be less competitive.  However, this is not necessarily true. Anwar Shaikh, Stephen Maher, Scott Aquanno, and others have argued that competition is, first and foremost, over profits rather than sales or market shares (though the latter are not unimportant).[7]“It therefore takes the form of competition between investment opportunities” within and between industries.[8] Intensity of competition is in turn not a function of the number of firms; rather, it hinges on the mobility of capital regulated by profitability: “the mobility of capital implies that new investment will accelerate relative to demand in industries with higher rates of profit and decelerate relative to demand in industries with lower rates of profit.”[9]

This mobility is facilitated by finance, and by new forms of financialization, which ease the flows of capital across and within industries and countries. Financial capital is notably well-integrated into today’s tech sector.[10] The search engine industry constitutes a major example.

In 2023, the global search engine market was worth $ 205.48 billion, and it is expected to reach $507.37 billion by 2032, with a compounding annual growth rate of 11%.[11] Competition in this sector is in fact intense.

Three big asset management financial firms – BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street – are all major shareholders of Google, but that does not preclude them from also investing in new search engine companies. Even if one captures a small fraction of $205.48 billion, this is enough incentive for capital to invest, if the profit rate is high enough. A stream of search engine start-ups continues to spring up.[12]

Foremost, Microsoft Bing is still in the search engine game, as is Yahoo!, which is majority-owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Management. Apple has plenty of cash on hand to develop its search. It has spent billions of dollars building out its mapping service and app search. Amazon and Meta function as vertical search engines which index a specific domain, and they are eroding Google’s main source of ads revenue. As of 2023, Amazon is the third-largest advertising platform in the US with $49 billion in ads revenue, trailing behind Google and Facebook.[13]

Google has tried mightily to defend its market share and to deflect competition, including paying Apple $22 billion in 2022 aloneto be its default search engine, but it faces a Sisyphean task to eliminate competition. Economist Howard Botwinick explains the theoretical issue: “Within the context of large-scale enterprise, the relentless drive to expand capital value is necessarily accompanied by a growing struggle over market shares. These two dynamics, accumulation and rivalry, are inextricably bound up with one another.”[14]

In addition, competition has spiraled as firms seek to adapt never-ending new technologies to build adjacent and profitable new markets. Search, social media, e-commerce, mobile, cloud, AI, etc. appear to be separate domains, but all are in play among the major tech companies – which foray into each other’s territories while defending their existing profit centers. In each case they are competing to carve out new profitable businesses, even beyond the internet sectors, through ventures into military, automobile, pharmaceutical, agriculture, education, and healthcare markets.[15]

With AI technologies, there are still further entries into the search market. Open AI, backed by Microsoft and major venture capital, is building its own search engine and threatening Google’s core business. During the first six months of 2024 alone, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta spent $106 billion on AI capital investment.[16] As Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called Godfather of AI, puts it, now that the genie has been unleashed they have no choice but to compete in this domain.[17] Other AI entrants have also plunged into the fray. AI-based search engines Perplexity[18] and Genspark[19] have already raised millions of dollars from asset management firms and venture capital.

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Digital Capitalism Geo-Political Economy of Information TikTok

Our Kind of Villain*

By Schiller and Yeo

(*With apologies to John Le Carre) A bill to expel the massively popular TikTok from the United States unless it cuts its ties to its Chinese owner, ByteDance, has gained unprecedented political momentum. Shrill arguments in favor of the legislation trumpet a need for national security. Foreign ownership of this social media site, they exclaim, is an urgent threat. However, the national security claim obfuscates the real reason behind the campaign against TikTok. A brief historical review of how the US has deployed foreign ownership strictures in communications helps clarify the situation.

The 1934 Communications Act carried over and cemented provisions in place to cover broadcast media, telecommunications and aeronautical media licensees.[1] Foreigners were barred from owning more than a minority interest – 25% – in US radio licensees.[2]  These strictures have endured, though with a notorious exception. 

This departure came under Republican President Reagan’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The beneficiary was Rupert Murdoch. In 1985, the FCC allowed Murdoch – on the verge of exchanging Australian for US citizenship – and his Australian News Corporation to purchase seven large US broadcast stations.[3]

Murdoch’s track-record was already plain. He had attacked journalists’ and printers’ unions and -infamously – intervened strongly in his newspaper’s supposedly independent editorial decisions to help ensure that Labor Party Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was not re-elected in 1975.[4] His newspapers had contributed mightily to the rise of Margaret Thatcher in Britain, actively pushing both journalism and politics to the right. And his representation before the FCC was deceptive.[5] Nevertheless, citing a need for “competition,” Reagan’s FCC granted Murdoch a right to enter US major-market broadcasting. This paved the way for him to establish the Fox Broadcasting Network (1986) and, with the aid of the vicious right-winger Roger Ailes, to roll out Fox News a decade later. In 1995, its original decision under challenge from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Murdoch meanwhile having covertly built up his stake in these broadcast properties to 99 percent, a now-Democratic FCC reaffirmed its earlier decision and permitted him to continue owning them.[6] Murdoch is our kind of villain.

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