Hyperscalers are carving up the ocean floor into private internet highways

Could make the argument the other way too though. If these companies bought bandwidth from for profit companies like Level3 who charge them an arm and a leg, then it’d be the final consumer who’d be paying the costs. By having their own pipes they can distribute content at cost and only charge for the value add.

... and all that would take is for ex-government monopolies to actually pay for the bandwidth they sell to their customers. If that happened, there's nothing content providers could do to change it. It's the telecoms that control all the cabling, and usually have broad protection in law, especially for international communication.

The trade telecoms got is legal protection, guaranteed profit, monopoly-style protection in trade for digging all the communication lines that are needed to connect up the country (including "last mile"). Needless to say, they too the legal protection, monopolist position and profit ... and neglected or outright refused to dig the communication lines.

But this way, they can make 0.01% more money ... that's literally it. That's what the peering wars are about. Forcing others to pay. It's been going on so long there's literally a name for it in the theory of the internet protocols: "hot potato routing". Giving up extremely essential control for a tiny amount of money.

And, frankly, having been part of a few battles in the peering wars, some of it is just ego of higher ups.