Undersea Cables and the Material Politics of Digital Connectivity | Lawfare
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In March, as U.S. and Israeli military operations against Iran were underway, Iran struck critical nodes of digital infrastructure, including Amazon Web Services data centers in the United Arab Emirates, highlighting the fragility of the infrastructure upon which the world depends for communications, economic activity, and security. The conflict also disrupted undersea cable development projects in the region, such as the “Pearls” segment of Meta’s 2Africa consortium cable project in the Persian Gulf. As digital infrastructure is more deeply tied to geopolitics, the governance questions surrounding it have become more urgent.<br>In “The Web Beneath the Waves,” Samanth Subramanian brings to light the significance of undersea cables for internet connectivity, economic activity, geopolitics, and security, while investigating who exercises control over this critical infrastructure. Submarine cables are essential infrastructure for global communications; no replacement comes close in terms of data-carrying capacity, speed, and cost. As shown by sociologist Susan Leigh Star, infrastructure tends to become visible upon breakdown. It is through moments of failure, fragility, and breakdown that Subramanian makes the political and social significance of these systems legible to a public audience. The book lays bare questions of maintenance, responsibility, and governance that are typically obscured by the seeming invisibility of these networks. For legal scholars and policymakers, it is less fully developed in its engagement with the governance and legal questions that its own reporting raises.<br>Cables and the Fragilities of Global Connectivity<br>The book starts by making the stakes of a cable break apparent, especially in regions linked to the internet through a single cable. In January 2022, the Hunga Tonga volcano’s powerful atmospheric explosion pushed rock, ash, and sediment into the air, which fell back into the ocean. The rock and sediment severed 55 miles of Tonga’s single international link, connecting Tongatapu to Fiji, and through there to the broader global network. The volcanic eruption disconnected Tonga from the internet and electronic communications with the rest of the world for five weeks. International money transfers were halted, communications were disrupted, and economic activity was interrupted.<br>This example illustrates how deeply every aspect of daily life depends on a communications infrastructure that typically remains invisible and is taken for granted until it fails. The cable breakage also made coordinating cable repairs extremely difficult, as the communications needed to organize them had themselves gone dark. As Subramanian observes, “[t]he safety of cables in the ocean is a national security issue, a precondition for the economy, and a matter of literal life and death.” Island states are particularly vulnerable to cable disruptions due to the limited connections they tend to have and their distance from repair hubs. The Tonga case illustrates not just the vulnerabilities of an island with limited cable connections, but the fragilities of the global cable network as a whole.<br>Empire, Cable Ownership, and Geopolitics<br>From Tonga, Subramanian traces the geographies of cables and the parallels between their imperial pasts and contemporary geographies reflected in today’s fiber optic cables that support the digital economy. The British Empire’s dominance over undersea cables and thus telegraphic communications during the period of wired communications networks’ dominance both reflected and reinforced its imperial power. Its control over Malaya, where the insulating material of gutta percha was derived and extracted, gave it distinct advantages in developing cable infrastructure. The empire’s power was reinforced by swift communications that enabled it to quell rebellions from afar and communicate with local colonial administrators more quickly. These early submarine cable paths created path dependencies, as can be seen in the overlaps between those geographies and the maps of today’s submarine cables. Subramanian also discusses transformations in the materials used for cable communications, such as the transition to fiber optics and glass in the 1980s, which enabled significantly higher speeds and capacity.<br>While many cable geographies reflect and perpetuate historical inequalities and imperial interests, contemporary networks have generated new patterns of concentrated ownership and dependency. Subramanian draws on his experience attending the International Cable...