The Underwater Cables That Carry the Internet Are in Trouble (bloomberg.com)
- Reference: 0180216071
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/11/26/1448212/the-underwater-cables-that-carry-the-internet-are-in-trouble
- Source link: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-11-26/underwater-cables-that-carry-the-internet-are-in-trouble
The cables are protected by layers of copper, steel, and plastics, but they remain vulnerable at multiple points: earthquakes can disturb them on the seafloor, and the connections where cables meet land-based infrastructure present targets for bad actors. National actors including Russia, China and the US possess the capability to attack these cables.
A bipartisan Senate bill co-sponsored by Democrat Jeanne Shaheen and Republican John Barrasso is under consideration. The legislation would require a report to Congress within six months on Chinese and Russian sabotage efforts, mandate sanctions against foreign parties responsible for attacks, and direct the US to provide more resources for cable protection and repair.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-11-26/underwater-cables-that-carry-the-internet-are-in-trouble
So... (Score:2)
> The legislation would require a report to Congress within six months on Chinese and Russian sabotage efforts
Does this mean the US won't have to report on their own sabotage efforts to congress?
Re: (Score:1)
"Epstein diddit"
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> "Epstein diddit"
I knew it! He's probably down there right now in the Titan submersible plotting revenge.
Very difficult to defend (Score:3)
There are so many ships passing over them every day they are very difficult to defend. On top of that there are a lot of Russian ships to be escorting. I do think we should likely increase surveillance of the cables so its easier to identify which vessel sabotaged them making it less of an investigation and more of a raid the ship and arrest the crew situation if we can. We can't stop the state involved from sanction these attacks but we can put the people doing them behind bars and seize the ships to dissuade it.
There is a whole (shorter) book on this very topic (Score:2)
It is called; The Web Beneath the Waves: The Fragile Cables That Connect Our World by Samanth Subramanian. Just came out this season of the year.
Make the Web Webby Again! (Score:2)
That's the problem: they are not a web. The original idea of the internet was to have a web of connections so that a few cables or nodes going bad wouldn't stop data movement, it would route around the bad spots via going through adjacent parts of the web. Seems we have to return to the original vision.
Technically they usually route around damaged sea cables via a larger scale redundancy, such as through another continent, but the webbiness needs to be per sea based on the rate of damage so far.
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Yes. Too much of the international cables are controlled by Alphabet (Google) and Meta (Facebook) these days. Now Amazon instead of owning shares of a consortium of monopolists it is owning them outright. Though that is not based on the book as I have not gotten to any part of it yet but it has undergone enshittification by not enforcing antitrust (outside of a few years ago and also generations ago (45+ish years), namely the 117th and it continued into the 118th congress in the U.S.A. - some international
Maybe host more locally? (Score:2)
Really, what is so much traffic routed undersea? Local CDNs and geo targetting should be used more!
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Local CDNs do nothing for real time data (banking transactions, for example). But for the average bandwidth consumer, I suppose it doesn't matter where the TikTok chicks twerking originates from.
95% figure is incorrect. (Score:3)
95% of INTERNATIONAL internet traffic is routed through undersea cable. The VAST MAJORITY of internet traffic here in the US is domestic, and not routed through undersea cables.
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But "95% of international traffic" is not the same as "95% of traffic". You are slicing the wrong pie, Happy Thanksgiving!
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Yes on the international; it is also more than 95 percent of that type of internet traffic. I have had quite a few typos myself on here but it would be nice to have a fourth /. regular editor on here so they have more time to vet stories and summarize accurately more often of the time. Thanks though for bringing that important distinction.
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You mean, make them self-destructing? yyyyYYYEAH.
Re:Easy Fix... (Score:5, Informative)
They are thousands of miles of cable involved, it is impossible to totally protect them. After all it takes to destroy one is a hook on the end of very long cable. At the start of WW1, one of the first things the British did was to cut the German transatlantic cables. The Germans were forced to use communications that the British could intercept. (see the history of the Zimmerman telegram). Redundancy is probably the only real solution, but the cost is significant.
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Yep, protecting thousands of miles of cables in remote places from sabotage is near impossible. And as the world becomes ever more unstable, I see more snips in the future. Does anyone really believe Gaza is fixed or that Ukraine will be fixed by recent treaties?
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Especially when basically all methods of sabotaging cables(except possibly very near shore) are 'remote'/disposable; if only at the tech level of 'put anchor on rope because water deep'. Nobody is going to give a damn about losing an inert metal chunk.
Reportedly, none of that is public, the business of tapping a fiber line underwater is considerably more fiddly, and enough mines might make that a hassle; but it would also make install and repair far more expensive and probably just theatre when you consi