As nations compete for digital dominance, the ocean floor has emerged as the newest and least visible stage for geopolitical rivalry
By
On 25 June 2026, the US Federal Communications Commission voted to rewrite the rules of the global internet. The regulator moved to require, for the first time, licences for operators of submarine line terminal equipment, the components that connect undersea cables to US terrestrial networks, and to bar equipment from China and any other country it deems a foreign adversary.
The message from the FCC is clear: if you meet stringent national security standards you will receive a fast track to approval; fall short, and face denial.
The ruling drew an angry rebuke from Beijing, which demanded Washington withdraw the measures and treat Chinese firms fairly. But the deeper significance lies elsewhere. With a single regulatory vote, Washington confirmed what a decade of sabotage incidents and diplomatic standoffs had already made plain, that the seabed is not neutral infrastructure.
The invisible backbone
More than 400 subsea cables carry roughly 99 per cent of intercontinental internet traffic. Every transnational video call, financial transaction, diplomatic cable and military command that leaves a national border is, overwhelmingly, travelling through a glass strand the width of a garden hose, draped across the seabed, hundreds of metres beneath the waves.
The infrastructure has built up over time, and this causes a number of issues. The first is concentration around a handful of chokepoints, such as landing stations and terminal-equipment nodes. The second is ownership. Where telecom consortia once built and maintained cables collectively, private mega companies such as Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft now finance a large and growing share of new capacity.
Meta’s Project Waterworth, announced as the world’s longest subsea cable spanning five continents, exemplifies the shift. The infrastructure of the global internet is increasingly being routed, owned and shaped by a handful of private firms answerable mainly to themselves. The FCC’s licensing push is, in part, an attempt to drag that private power back under public oversight.
Friendshoring the seabed
What the FCC ruling really codifies is a strategy known as ‘friendshoring’ the seabed. This strategy involves integrating allies into data supply chains while systematically excluding rivals. The FCC now bars Huawei, ZTE, China Telecom and China Mobile from future infrastructure projects. Likewise, there is now diplomatic pressure being exercised to attempt to block Chinese manufacturers – such as HMN Tech – from winning cable tenders across the Pacific, along with a parallel effort by Google and Meta to literally reroute Asia’s internet around China.
The seabed is being divided into spheres of influence not through flags or borders, but through landing licences, equipment approvals and capacity-leasing agreements. Control flows not from who owns the ocean floor but from who decides which cables can land, which companies can operate them, and which foreign equipment is considered too risky.
Sabotage and the attribution problem
The regulatory turn has been accelerated by a wave of physical incidents. In late 2024, suspected cable cuts in the Baltic Sea were blamed on vessels linked to Russia’s shadow naval fleet. In June 2025, a Chinese captain was convicted in Taiwan for dragging an anchor and severing the island’s submarine cables.
NATO’s Baltic Sentry mission, launched in January 2025, has since cut incident response times from roughly seventeen hours to one, while the EU has committed €347million to subsea resilience.
But militarising the seabed exposes a stubborn legal gap. The 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea grants states the right to lay and maintain cables and obliges them to criminalise intentional damage, but leaves enforcement to national law and naval capacity. In international waters, there is no framework for boarding a suspect vessel, seizing cargo or detaining a crew. Deterrence hinges on the speed and coherence with which states can move from detection to attribution to legal action.
The splinternet beneath the waves
The FCC’s rules will not, by themselves, secure the seabed, but they mark a turning point. Cables are being folded into the same logic of decoupling that has reshaped semiconductors and 5G. The internet is being splintered beneath the waves, with friends and foes routed along separate cables. There are real costs to this: redundancy shrinks, costs rise, and the once-global network fractures into blocs.
A fit-for-purpose global data infrastructure will eventually need more than national licensing. It will require updated international law, mandatory public-private threat-sharing, allied surveillance arrangements, and investment in the ageing global fleet of cable-repair ships. The ocean floor is now the newest domain of geopolitical contest, but to most it is invisible, while also being indispensable, and almost entirely ungoverned.
