As US tech giants become cable giants, it’s time we pay attention to our seabeds

Elisabeth Braw is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, the author of the award-winning “Goodbye Globalization” and a regular columnist for POLITICO. Her new book, Undersea War, is out later this year.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered a thoughtful and stirring speech at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, speaking of “a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where geopolitics, where the large, main power, geopolitics, is submitted to no limits, no constraints.” Though he didn’t mention the U.S. by name, it was clear Washington’s recent behavior had driven him to this conclusion.

The speech didn’t please U.S. President Donald Trump, who went on to call Carney ungrateful and threatened to impose 100-percent tariffs on Canada if it struck a trade deal with China — even though Washington itself has been conducting a series of trade talks with Beijing.

Trump appears willing to harm America’s allies in ways that once seemed inconceivable, and threats — as we’ve learned — are his way, with many of them are directed at allies.

The threat against Canada, for example, came just days after Trump reminded luminaries at the World Economic Forum in Davos that he was very serious about annexing Greenland. And that was after he’d threatened new U.S. tariffs against European nations voicing support for Denmark. Tariffs for European friends are, of course, already a reality. In late January, the U.S. president told an interviewer he imposed 39 percent tariffs on Switzerland after its president “rubbed me the wrong way.”

All of this is why we need to start looking somewhere we haven’t had to before: at the bottom of the ocean, at undersea cables — more specifically, at the U.S. firms owning undersea cables. Google & Co. aren’t just tech giants, they’re now cable giants too. And if the White House were to instruct them to disconnect the nations it wanted to hurt, those countries would find themselves in very serious trouble.

The speech didn’t please U.S. President Donald Trump, who went on to call Mark Carney ungrateful and threatened to impose 100-percent tariffs on Canada if it struck a trade deal with China. | Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images

Back in the 1850s, when undersea telegraph cables were first invented, they were owned by a small number of pioneering private companies. Because the prospect of international telegraph traffic was enormously appealing, a couple of them managed to attract government backing for their more audacious undertakings.

Later on, as cable traffic developed and grew, it mostly became the domain of state-owned postal services, since they were also in charge of telegraph services. And when undersea telephone cables arrived in the mid-20th century, they were mostly helmed by government-owned telephone companies.

Nowadays, we have several hundred data cables on the seabed because that’s how the Internet travels. For decades, telephone companies around the world teamed up to buy and operate them. More recently, however, tech companies, television providers and a whole host of other companies solely in the business of owning and operating subsea cables have also joined in.

Since undersea cables are expensive and — for the most part — connect two or more countries, such international consortia make sense. Unsurprisingly, some of these consortium participants are American. But these days, some of the most powerful cables being installed have only one kind of owner: a U.S. tech giant.

Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft already co-own numerous subsea cables with other firms, but now they’re striking out on their own: Google, the leader of the pack, already operates a cable connecting South Carolina with Bermuda and Portugal, and it’s about to add more, including the only cable connecting Florida and Europe. Amazon will be the sole owner of a new cable connecting Ireland and the U.S., and Meta is working on Waterworth — a massive 50,000-kilometer cable circling the globe.

These wealthy firms indisputably have the money, and their assumption that AI will further accelerate data use is also beyond argument. The tricky part is the state of the world.

Back in the 1850s, when undersea telegraph cables were first invented, they were owned by a small number of pioneering private companies. | The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images

Subsea cables functioned swimmingly during the harmonious post-Cold War years because nations were eager to get along and increase prosperity. In the past three years, however, we’ve received regular and dramatic reminders that people, perhaps at the behest of a hostile state, can damage these cables.

That’s why we need to worry about the prospect of a new geopolitical risk on the seabed — the risk that a country may decide to harm other nations by exploiting the cables’ ownership.

China and the U.S. already lean on their cable owners not to connect any upcoming cables with the respective other country. And while many Western nations have grown wary of close ties with China, Trump’s recent conduct suggests they should be concerned about data-cable dependence on the U.S. as well.

U.S. cable owners are in the business of business, not geopolitics. But if the U.S. president, perhaps enraged by the comments of a European leader, were to tell tech giants to block the continent from the cables they own or co-own, would they really defy his instructions? Based on their behavior leading up to Trump’s second inauguration — where the CEOs of Amazon, Meta and Google stood behind him at the ceremony — it’s safe to say the answer is a likely “no.”

European banks and officials are already thinking along such lines when it comes to the dominance of U.S. payment cards like Visa. They have, according to the Financial Times, “become increasingly concerned that US payment companies’ power could be weaponised in the event of a serious breakdown in relations.” Indeed, on Feb. 19,  Britain’s banking bosses will meet to discuss a U.K. alternative. It would be privately owned and backed by the government, the Guardian reports.

On the seabed, we also need to prepare accordingly. That includes helping European companies form alliances that can compete with the Silicon Valley hegemons-in-waiting.