The TeleGeography undersea cable map, 2025 edition. (Courtesy TeleGeography)
On the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, at a depth of roughly 3,000 metres, a bundle of optical fibres carries the emails, the TikToks, the bank transfers, and the classified government communications of the Western world. It is not classified. You can look up the route on TeleGeography's public cable map. The coordinates of the landing stations are known. And yet, for most of the last two decades, governments acted as if the cables were not there.
That changed sometime around 2022, when the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline made European security establishments think seriously about what else runs under the sea. The answer — for anyone who cared to look — was everything. Ninety-nine percent of intercontinental internet traffic moves through seventeen active cable systems. All of them are privately owned. Most are co-owned by Google, Meta, and three or four national telecoms. None have meaningful military protection.
"We don't think of cables as infrastructure the way we think of highways or power lines, because we don't see them. But remove them and the global economy stops in minutes, not days."
The Ownership Problem
The governance of undersea cables has never caught up with their strategic importance. The cables are regulated as telecommunications equipment. They are permitted under UNCLOS, which treats the seabed as a shared commons. Repairs are handled by a small cartel of specialized ships — there are roughly fifty capable vessels worldwide. There is no meaningful international framework for protecting them.
When a fishing trawler dragged its anchor across a cable off Taiwan in 2006, it severed connections between Taiwan and the Philippines and slowed internet speeds across Southeast Asia for weeks. When the Houthi movement damaged cables in the Red Sea in early 2024, the event was treated primarily as a logistics story. The strategic implications received less attention.
What Governments Are Actually Doing
The policy response has been fragmentary but real. The US has begun scrutinizing cable landing licenses more closely, blocking Huawei Marine from participating in projects connecting American landing stations. The EU has put cables on its critical infrastructure list, though without corresponding enforcement mechanisms. Australia has passed legislation requiring cable operators to notify the government of maintenance work — a measure so minimal it reads as performative.
The serious work is happening at the national intelligence level, not the policy level. NATO has begun coordinating cable monitoring activities. The UK has established a joint government-industry cable protection group. These are useful, quiet steps. They are not a substitute for a coherent international framework.