The Digital Empires Under the Seas
Far from the minds of most of us, the geopolitics of undersea internet cables are playing out in increasingly important ways.
The other week I was driving along the winding, hilly and rugged coastline of Nova Scotia outside the capitol city of Halifax. I passed by a relatively bland, seemingly unimportant driveway. Only remarkable by the black, large wrought iron gates with stone pillars on either side and a small plaque on one pillar with a civic address below. One could easily miss that this was where one of the most important internet cables connecting North America to Europe landed.
Though with current geopolitical tensions, we may soon experience disruptions from undersea cables at a more personal level, such as not being able to stream services from YouTube to Netflix to WhatsApp and Messenger. Our first sign of this was the cutting off of two undersea cables in the Baltic sea this past week. You can guess the usual suspect.
Whenever you send an email, post on a social media platform or stream a video, it is more than likely that it has travelled underwater across a vast ocean expanse. That the email you just sent may well have passed through the territorial waters of five countries. Each with its own laws and regulations stipulating who can read that email.
We give scant thought to the geopolitics of undersea internet cables in our daily lives. Many might assume that this data is flowing through satellites, but very little internet traffic flies through the skies from low orbit. Even with the arrival of Starlink and OneWeb services. Combined, satellite internet services transmit less than 3% of the internet’s traffic.
In the time it takes you to read this sentence, over 100 million emails have traveled through underwater cables leaner than a garden hose, filled with fibres thinner than a human hair. A single cable can carry over 400 million phone calls at the same time. Everyone in America could all be on the phone at the same time with room to spare for more calls.
Yet just four companies own more than 60% of the world’s underwater networks. There’s only about 60 ships that lay and repair these cables around the world. So few that in 2023 an American cable ship helped repair a Chinese owned cable carrying Chinese data.
During the 2006 earthquake in Taiwan several cables were severed. Not because of the earthquake, but due to the anchors from ships being dragged along the sea bottom, slicing them. It impacted financial markets.
Scientists are even working on undersea and ground cables that would be quantum encrypted to address the rising concerns over quantum computing and its ability to easily hack current security systems.
Then there’s interesting research that could see undersea internet cables being used to detect tsunamis, water temperatures and other environmental information. Turning these cables into part of our planet’s health monitoring systems.
All of this has deeper geopolitical considerations beyond just hostile nation states hacking into or destroying the cables. Cable ships today can spend upwards of 40% of their time at sea waiting to enter territorial waters than they did over a decade ago. This as countries increasingly demand a stake in ownership of the cables traveling through their waters. To both derive national revenues and reduce costs to citizens and businesses.
For example, when internet cables were being routed through Tanzanian waters, the government demanded partial ownership. But it was more than ownership they were after, it was an exercise in digital sovereignty and it reduced their internet access costs by 50%.
Most of the ships that lay and repair these cables are owned by Western countries with the majority being American. This has lead to concerns over “digital colonialism” and set up legal battles in other countries and is the reason developing nations exercise their digital sovereignty.
How and where data moves, as I’ve written before, is also becoming geopolitical as countries develop different laws and regulations around the movement of data for taxation and accessibility by a government. The cables carry this data and thus it can impact multinational corporations, other governments and citizens who are the bystanders in this digital game of cables and data.
Consider that if you’ve just watched a YouTube vide, that data has likely traveled through three countries, again with their own rules and laws on the movement of data. In the finance world, this is increasingly a concern both in terms of the speed of trades being conducted, but also how governments may look to tax or charge fees on trades in the future.
Multinational corporations today rely heavily on the transmission of massive amounts of corporate data between the countries they operate in. For the past couple of decades, their biggest concern was cybercrime and being hacked. Now, they must also consider the impacts of data regulations, from how and when they transmit data to where they store it and how its used.
Governments are now looking to ways to make their undersea cables more secure and protect them from both state and non-state actors. A challenge driven not just by various conflicts, but by a re-aligning of geopolitical value systems between democracies and autocracies.
For it’s not just the cables themselves, but the equipment such as routers and hubs at the landing points. Western countries are nervous about letting Chinese hardware companies put their gear in data centres, nodes and landing places as these routers, for example, could siphon off data and send it back to a potentially hostile nation, tapping into state and corporate secrets.
To most of us, cables running under the ocean are out of sight and out of mind, ephemeral and meaningless. For governments and global corporations, they are the future of critical communications infrastructure as trillions of dollars in economic value flow through them in zeroes and ones every day.
While we may be entering a period of nationalism and thus isolationism, it rally isn’t possible today for any country to completely isolate itself. Russia and North Korea may have their own internal networks, but even they have to connect to the broader World Wide Web at various points and thus are susceptible.
The undersea cables carrying your emails, your WhatsApp messages have become the frontlines of global power dynamics. As politically charged as oil pipelines and shipping routes. Not only might that new device you ordered be delayed, but your streamed movies and music too.
Just as past generations have fought over roads, railways, airways, ports and shipping, now too are countries fighting over control of these digital arteries connecting our cultures and societies.
Whoever controls these slivers of glass snaking across ocean floors, deep beneath the waves doesn’t just control the flow of data, but the very future of how we shape our sociocultural systems.