For example, Britain forced companies that operated transatlantic submarine cables to use London as their connection hub (after World War I, the epicenter for global communications shifted from England to the United States). Ownership of the new communication infrastructure continued to follow colonial models as well by concentrating it in the hands of a few multinational consortia of state and private-sector corporations. When independence was finally achieved, former colonies simply inherited the infrastructure of the colonizers and in many cases were pressured to allow foreign companies to continue to control and profit from that infrastructure. To attempt to intervene with that model could have potentially disastrous results, as evidenced by the extreme example of Chile, where the US-based International Telephone & Telegraph corporation played a crucial role in the CIA-backed overthrow of the government in 1973 after democratically elected president Salvador Allende threatened, among other measures, to nationalize the telecom industry.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 314