The technical infrastructure of the internet, including the protocols, data centres, and cables that move information around the world, has become a critical site of contestation for free expression. At the same time, the growing corporate dominance over the internet’s physical foundation presents new challenges to a free and open internet, and the enjoyment of our rights. In this blog, ARTICLE 19 sets out why subsea cable governance, in particular, demands the attention of human rights advocates, regulators, and the broader public.
Whenever information – from reports on internet censorship to phone calls to family across continents – needs to cross a body of water or traverse continents, it travels via subsea cables. They are critical for a resilient internet, which makes them a key enabler of freedom of expression.
Until recently, this infrastructure was built and operated mostly by governments and telecommunications companies (‘telcos’) in consortia, who then sold capacity on to anyone needing to move data across the world.
That model is shifting fast. As recently as 2016, telcos and other internet backbone providers accounted for the majority of subsea data traffic. Today, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon collectively account for nearly three-quarters of all subsea fibre capacity. And the same four companies are increasingly building, owning, and operating cables.
ARTICLE 19 has long worked at the intersection of internet governance and freedom of expression, and as such, we are now turning our attention towards this key infrastructure. For the past year, we have examined a change that has unfolded quietly but quickly: the Big Tech companies that have long been the largest consumers of cable capacity, now control large parts of the subsea cable infrastructure.
This represents a seismic shift in the industry: the same entities powering major digital services (from the app store to social media platforms to software development), and using most of the ‘capacity’ of data traffic (and compute), are now shaping the spatial mapping of the internet.
Yet, this shift has gone largely unnoticed in the public debate. Much of the media coverage of subsea cables focuses on deliberate acts of cable sabotage. The focus on national security concerns has left little room for discussions of issues of equal – or potentially, greater – concern.
While there are a number of pressing issues facing subsea cable infrastructure, ARTICLE 19 believes that more attention needs to be paid to the increasing vertical concentration in the broader ecosystem and the potential consequences this has on its governance in the public interest.
The realities of the subsea cable industry
There are three key things to know about the subsea cable ecosystem.
It is a small and closed world
The tagline of the biggest annual subsea cable conference, the Pacific Telecommunications Council (PTC), says it best: ‘by industry, for industry’. Across the events in which ARTICLE 19 participated this past year, attendees ranged from regulators to financiers (such as private equity firms and development banks) to academics. However, the majority of attendees were corporate actors, including cable suppliers, telecoms operators, and Big Tech, especially cloud hyperscalers. Crucially, government officials were underrepresented, and civil society mostly absent.
Building a cable is expensive
Because subsea cables are so capital-intensive, the dominant historical model has been the consortium: a group of telecom operators (many of which are state-owned), financiers and governments sharing the cost, the risk, and control of a single cable. With this model, each member owns a share of fibre pairs, with each fibre pair carrying a certain amount of data. The total amount of traffic the cable can transmit across all its fibre pairs represents the cable’s ‘capacity’. For example, the South-East Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 5 cable (known as ‘SEA-ME-WE-5’) has a total of 19 consortium members, with representatives of national telcos from across Europe and Asia; this reduces the risk and costs for each individual company.
On average, subsea cables have a 17-year lifespan. The boom in cable laying happened in the early 2010s, which means many of those cables are now being retired, just as Big Tech’s financed cables are being put in place to replace them.
Building and operating a cable is complicated, and opaque
The production and installation process for a subsea cable is complicated, involving a variety of actors, each with distinct legal and regulatory requirements. There is also a very long and complicated phase of feasibility studies and tests/certifications.
Because of this, the majority of subsea cable projects are carried out by one of three ‘turnkey providers’ who manage the full lifecycle of the project: Alcatel Submarine Networks (acquired in 2024 by the French government), NEC Corporation (a private company headquartered in Japan), and SubCom (USA-based, owned by a private equity firm). These three companies provide the manufacturing, installation, and deployment power for over 1.5 million km of cables in service globally, collectively representing more than 60% of the total subsea cable market.
The contracts for cable building, ownership and capacity sharing are drafted, negotiated and signed behind closed doors. Capacity sharing refers to the percentage of the total fibre pairs that each consortium member can access.
Crucially, many Big Tech companies, especially the cloud hyperscalers, operate their own private fibres that carry their traffic across their data centres.
As reported by the critical infrastructure lab, there is a lack of reliable data sources on ownership and capacity sharing structures for subsea cables. Without reliable data, building a comprehensive picture of this shift in cable ownership and governance and its implications for the public interest is nearly impossible.
The unreported concentration of power
Historically, subsea cables were developed as joint political projects by governments and telcos, and were treated, respectively, as public goods or profit-seeking ventures. Subsea cables are an essential component of intercontinental communications infrastructure, and so governments’ involvement (particularly in the early 20th century with the installation of telegraph cables) meant they could ensure subsea cables were financed and managed with public oversight – but also to extend and consolidate colonial rule. Telcos, for their part, pursued profit. Neither set of motives should be romanticised.
What is shifting now with the entry of Big Tech, however, is the scale of private control and the near total absence of public input or accountability.
This new model cedes a critical layer of intercontinental communications infrastructure to a handful of Big Tech firms. Those companies are now bypassing the consortium or public-private-partnership models, and whatever limited oversight they provided, entirely.
Even fewer entities are in the room when subsea cable routing and operational decisions are made. ‘Sole-ownership models’, where a single entity privately finances and controls a cable, is now the structure pushed by the new giants of this space. By financing cables themselves, Big Tech can independently decide where cables are routed and who can access capacity with little public oversight or accountability. According to industry reports ‘…decisions made by [these companies] often dictate whether a project is viable, which suppliers are selected, and how capacity is marketed’.
Yet, this industry dynamic receives little public attention. In part due to the increased media coverage of high-profile cable sabotage events, governments are increasingly focused on subsea cable physical security. Last month, a leading US senator called for new efforts to ‘end undersea sabotage’. To be sure, there are grounds to be concerned: in a high-level incident last summer, Chinese-linked ships were suspected of damaging cables near Taiwan. However, the trend shows clearly that, even as the number of cable miles grows, there has not been a corresponding rise in cable cuts. Additionally, with Big Tech footing the bill, governments have less of an incentive to contribute public funds to subsea cable development.
If the attention remains focused on sabotage, while systemic changes and increased role of Big Tech in the sector remain unnoticed and unaccounted for, the risk is that we miss the ‘forest’ for the ‘fibres’.
The unexplored human rights consequences
For its potential consequences for freedom of expression online, the subsea cable layer of the internet and its governance remains strikingly unexamined. The full implications are still being mapped, including by ARTICLE 19. While many questions remain, a few key elements stand out.
The entry of Big Tech into the subsea cable market, and the vertical integration it ushers in, risks concentrating power in the hands of a few dominant companies. It means that almost everything we think of as ‘the internet’ – video calls, search queries, payments or messages – relies on a physical infrastructure that is fragile, expensive, complicated to build and operate, and increasingly concentrated in a small number of hands. As ARTICLE 19’s longstanding work on digital markets shows, this has direct consequences for freedom of expression, as well as other human rights.
Politically, when a small group of Big Tech companies make decisions on where new cables are laid, which routes are prioritised, and what traffic is carried for whom, it follows commercial logic rather than public interest. This means that countries or communities which may not be lucrative customers can find themselves quietly routed around; and some traffic can receive priority, in violation of non-discrimination and net neutrality principles.
Fundamentally, subsea cables built for the internal needs of tech behemoths are not an infrastructure built or managed in the public interest. A cable project focused on optimising its use for Big Tech’s own services does not put the needs of internet users, nor their rights to freedom of expression, first – its aims are first and foremost profit-driven. Right now, the composition of the global subsea cable map is quietly being remade to prioritise connectivity powering data centres (e.g. on the basis of market forces) rather than serve people. This puts the future of the open internet at risk.
ARTICLE 19 will continue to research and monitor developments in subsea cable governance. We are currently building out a network of civil society actors working on cables, please be in touch with Global Team Digital ([email protected]) if you would like to be included.