Beneath the surface of the world’s oceans lies an infrastructure so essential, modern life would stall without it – yet so invisible it rarely enters public debate. Submarine cables, slender fibre-optic systems laid across the seabed, carry over 95 per cent of global internet traffic, transmitting the data that underpins financial markets, diplomatic exchanges and everyday communication.
What appears to be neutral infrastructure is, in fact, a deeply political system – one that exposes a structural blind spot in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Unclos was negotiated in a pre-digital era, when the ocean was primarily understood through the lenses of territory, navigation and resource extraction. It enshrines the freedom to lay submarine cables across the seabed, including areas beyond national jurisdiction. It did not anticipate a world in which these cables would evolve into dense, privately owned digital arteries.
Today, they are increasingly controlled not by states, but by powerful corporations whose infrastructural reach rivals sovereign authority. The result is a paradox: the seabed, legally open as a global commons, is functionally governed by those with the capital and technological capacity to build and maintain cable systems.
Submarine cables are often described as the backbone of the internet but this understates their geopolitical weight. Beyond conduits of information, they are strategic infrastructure that structures global power itself. Financial systems, military operations and diplomatic communications rely on their uninterrupted function. In an era of real-time data dependency, even temporary disruptions can produce cascading systemic risks across markets and governments.
Recent incidents in the Asia-Pacific highlight the growing vulnerability of submarine cable infrastructure. Unexplained disruptions have resulted in widespread connectivity outages, affecting multiple economies at once. While official accounts often attribute these incidents to accidental damage or natural causes, their frequency and timing have prompted policymakers to consider the possibility of more complex risks, including hybrid threats to critical infrastructure.
The transformation, however, lies not only in the vulnerability of cables but their ownership. The expansion of global cable networks is largely driven by private corporations, particularly major technology firms. They decide where cables are deployed, which regions receive high-capacity connectivity and how data flows are routed. In effect, they are redrawing the map of global connectivity to commercial imperatives.
This signals a shift from territorial sovereignty to what can be described as infrastructural power. Historically, influence at sea was exercised through naval dominance or jurisdictional claims. Today, it increasingly depends on the ability to design and control the infrastructure that enables global communication. Power is embedded in the architecture of connectivity itself. The seabed is being reconstituted as a privately structured digital domain.
Unclos, with its emphasis on open access, struggles to account for this reality. While all states formally enjoy the freedom to lay submarine cables, only a handful possess the resources and expertise required to do so at scale. This produces a condition of formal equality but material inequality: access to the seabed is legally universal, yet practically exclusive. The result is a layered system of control, where participation in the global digital economy is mediated by infrastructural inclusion or exclusion.
Regions connected to high-capacity, low-latency networks gain economic and strategic advantages, while less-connected regions remain peripheral. Connectivity thus becomes a form of structural power – subtle, indirect, but deeply consequential. In this sense, submarine cables represent a new form of maritime enclosure. Unlike traditional enclosures defined by territorial boundaries, this form operates through invisible corridors of influence. Control is exercised not by restricting access to space, but by structuring access to networks.
This exposes a deeper conceptual gap in the law of the sea. Unclos is grounded in a spatial logic – organising rights and obligations according to geographic zones. Yet the contemporary ocean is also a digital environment, defined by networks that transcend territorial boundaries and blur distinctions between public and private authority. The growing role of private actors in governing critical infrastructure challenges traditional assumptions about sovereignty, accountability and regulation.
Addressing this gap requires more than incremental legal reform; it demands a rethinking of ocean governance itself. Rather than abandoning Unclos, the task is to reinterpret and extend its principles to accommodate the realities of digital interdependence. This includes strengthening international cooperation on cable security, developing clearer rules for incident attribution and response, and establishing normative frameworks to govern the role of private corporations in global infrastructure.
At stake is not merely regulatory coherence, but the future of the global commons. If the ocean is to remain a shared space, its governance must evolve to address the asymmetries embedded in digital infrastructure. Otherwise, control over submarine cables may increasingly determine who benefits from the ocean – regardless of formal legal entitlements.
Submarine cables reveal a hidden layer of ocean governance, where power is embedded not in visible claims, but in the infrastructures that sustain global life. They challenge the enduring assumption that the ocean remains an open and equal domain, exposing instead a fragmented system shaped by private control, technological disparity and geopolitical competition.
In this emerging order, the most consequential struggles are unlikely to unfold on the ocean’s surface but beneath it – where data flows silently through privately owned networks. Unclos, for all its achievements, did not fully anticipate this transformation. The question is whether the law of the sea can evolve quickly enough to govern a world in which power flows through cables rather than territory.