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 coast line 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.
