Data has become the world’s most important resource. Now Silicon Valley giants want to withhold government from standing in the way of profitsOne hundred and sixty years ago,the first transatlantic telegram traveled from Britain to the United States along a rickety undersea wire. It consisted of twenty-one words – and took seventeen hours to arrive. nowadays, the same trip takes as minute as 60 milliseconds. A dense mesh of fiber-optic cables girdles the world, and pumping vast quantities of information across the planet. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that 543 terabits of data are flowing across borders every moment. That’s the equivalent of roughly 13 million copies of the complete works of Shakespeare.
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Source: guardian.co.uk