Great power struggle for undersea cable dominance

Undersea cables are vital for global communication, yet geopolitical tensions threaten their collaborative future.

Laid on ocean floor, undersea cables are arteries of international communication, digitalisation and globalisation and lifeblood of global economy. These 600 fiber-optic cables, activated or planned, spanning 1.4 million kilometers, carry 95% of global data by transmitting $10 trillion every day while offering fastest and reliable route.

These thin wires, as wide as a garden hose, are owned by a consortium of parties because of high costs associated with laying of new undersea ecosystems. Due to heightened risk of being damaged by natural disasters, fishing nets, ship anchors and sharks, there is a greater need for interstate cooperation to protect the flow of information they electronify.

But by proclaiming principles that aspire to advance cooperation between a handful of countries to "promote selection of secure and verifiable subsea cable providers", Washington is stonewalling cooperation on an area that delivers international bandwidth, necessary for global digital transition.

A blend of America's megaphone and coercive diplomacy, through which it denigrates China and strong-arms allies and telcos to dissuade them from partnering with Chinese companies, and geopolitics around information superhighways, underpinning the global economy and finance, to retain its subsea hegemony could stoke tensions with Beijing for the plan's ulterior goal is to phase one of the fastest-growing companies, China's HMN Technologies, out of the market.

America's SubCom, Japan's NEC and France's Alcatel historically dominated the sector before a seismic shift took place as HMN Tech (then Huawei Marine Networks) entered the fray in 2008 and disturbed the status quo, becoming an important player in the market over the next 15 years.

Emergence of a Chinese firm shook the US Department of Justice whose Team Telecom in 2020 raised national security concerns about China's "sustained efforts to acquire sensitive personal data of millions of US persons". In 2021, Washington finally added HMN to entity list.

An investigation of documents by The Guardian - with NSA's whistleblower Edward Snowden being the prime source - in 2013 revealed that the UK's spy agency, GCHQ, had tapped into more than 200 fiber-optic cables to access a huge volume of communications including between entirely innocent people, sharing sensitive personal information with its American peer.

NSA and other US intelligence agencies have been eavesdropping on its own Five Eyes' allies such as Australia and New Zealand and snooping on American people including protesters, racial justice activists, journalists, political commentators, campaign donors and Congressmen; there is no clear evidence that subsea cables are being tapped or sabotaged by any country, be it the US, China or Russia.

Recent reports have seen such threats as overblown. Labeling concerns vis-à-vis "tapping into cables to derive, copy or obfuscate data" as "highly unlikely", a European report in 2022 found "no publicly available and verified reports" indicating deliberate attacks including from China. The threat scenarios "could be exaggerated and suggest a substantial risk of threat inflation and fearmongering," it said.

Still, the unabated US offensive against the Chinese company continued as it - through incentives and pressure on consortium members including warnings and threats of sanctions and exports controls - flipped the contract of Southeast Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-6 (SEA-ME-WE-6) cable, snaking its way from Singapore to France, to SubCom.

Per Reuters, it was one of the six private undersea cable deals in Asia-Pacific where the US government had intervened to prevent HMN from winning or forced rerouting or abandonment of cable deals, unveiling Washington's innate impulse to monopolise undersea ecosystem and marking a beginning of underwater geopolitical rivalry.

Yet China struck back through a $500 million Europe-Middle East-Asia internet cable. Known as PEACE (Pakistan and East Asia Connecting Europe) cable, the project directly competes with SEA-ME-WE-6 and supersedes its rival project with a planned length of 25,000+ km against the latter's 21,700 km, providing even higher bandwidth.

The US efforts to control subsea cables shone as market share of HMN, which had built or repaired almost 25% of world's cables and supplied 18% of them in the last four years through 2022, is expected to contract to mere 7%. The top beneficiary of US interventionism is its SubCom that has grabbed only 12% of contracts but accounts for a whopping 40% of cables laid.

At the core of this competition is America's fear of conceding a critical component of the digital economy to China. US officials have voiced concern that the Chinese repair ships could be used for spying; there is no evidence of such an activity either. While some have dubbed submarine cables as "a surveillance gold mine" for world intelligence agencies, most experts believe the biggest risk isn't espionage, sabotage or even rogue anchors rather an uneven spread of cable infrastructure that threatens the very promise of digital equity and demands East-West cooperation to end this digital injustice, especially with the Global South.

For decades, America, France and Japan dominated global underwater ecosystem. Wary of losing their ascendancy, they are pooling efforts to exorcise Chinese demon and retain influence over submarine cables. The involvement of security alliances such as Quad "to support and strengthen quality undersea cable networks in the Indo-Pacific" and Biden's push to bolster cooperation in the region on cybersecurity including undersea cables and whisk regional submarine plans away from China are beseeching Beijing to respond, elevating risk of kicking off a cold war under the sea.

Multination cooperation has been catalyst of submarine cable expansion and is essential for future of digital economy. But this kiasu approach of asserting a closed group's unwater dominance is threatening to black out collaboration and divide the world in two geopolitical or ideological blocs. This simmering struggle for subsea hegemony should be lulled before it boils up and compounds global challenges, being faced by a fragmented world.