Its not a cartel, Telecom is the cartel, its just plain cheaper and more reliable to do it yourself, at scale. This should be played against the background of

Its not a cartel, Telecom is the cartel, its just plain cheaper and more reliable to do it yourself, at scale. This should be played against the background of a lot of transit providers being consumed into the twin blackholes of GTT and Level3. Dealing with them is a massive massive pain. They are almost always universally incompetent. Then there are peering agreements. In the US its all a bit wonky, as it costs to do anything. As far as I'm aware there are no coop style internet exchanges, which means that peering is prohibitively expensive. else where, in normal land, most places are coops, which means you pay a small fee and negotiate peering directly with other peers. Given that with the concentration of traffic around 4/5 company's datacenters it makes perfect sense to tap directly into those. Having a complete network under your control, with your QoS working globally right up to the last mile, is a worthy goal. Being <10ms away from 90% of your customers is worth the cost.