Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.

My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable

experts and genuinely engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC

makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.

If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds.

BBC Sounds.

BBC Sounds, Music Radio Podcasts.

Hello, and thank you for listening to Analysis, the podcast that looks at the ideas behind the news.

In this edition, James Ball looks at whether the infrastructure of the internet is up to scratch. It's a sunny morning in Portsmouth and I'm here to look at the

internet. The internet has grown into a vital piece of infrastructure.

It's a cornerstone of our economy, central to our personal and professional lives,

and the software on which society increasingly runs.

And when we think about the internet, we might imagine it as a floating cloud or a

gi enormous bank of servers or complicated strings of code. What we probably don't imagine

are cables the width of a hose pipe not far from here off the coast of Portsmouth. The internet works very differently from how we might expect,

both its physical infrastructure and the rules that govern it. I'm James Ball

journalist and author of the system who owns the internet and how it owns us.

And in this week's analysis, I'm asking whether the internet's up to scratch.

And if it's not, then what does that mean? asking whether the internet's up to scratch.

And if it's not, then what does that mean for us?

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