HLF 2026- Science and the City session reveals that hidden infrastructure of undersea cables carries 95% of international data traffic, Naresh Nunna of Neo Science Hub reports.
In an era when we casually speak of “the cloud” and wireless connectivity, it’s easy to forget that the internet—that seemingly ethereal network connecting billions—is anchored by very physical cables running along the ocean floor. Saturday’s second Science and the City session, “Tangled Webs: The Internet’s Infrastructure,” brought this material reality into sharp focus through journalist Samanth Subramanian’s exploration of the undersea cable networks that carry 95% of all international data traffic.
Moderated by Usha Raman, former professor of communications at the University of Hyderabad, the session was meant to include Apar Gupta, founder of the Internet Freedom Foundation, whose flight cancellation due to India’s air travel disruptions left the discussion focused primarily on Subramanian’s forthcoming book about the physical backbone of our digital world. The absence proved oddly appropriate—a reminder of how our interconnected systems remain vulnerable to the very terrestrial problems they were meant to transcend.
Colonial Pathways, Digital Highways
Subramanian opened with a striking visual exercise: “You can call up a map of telegraph lines from the 1850s or the 1860s, and you can call up the map of sea cables today, and you will see how strikingly identical they are. They are basically the same.”
This observation cuts to the heart of what many prefer to ignore—that the internet’s infrastructure mirrors colonial pathways of power. The thickest concentration of cables then and now runs from Western Europe to the east coast of the United States. Cables snake around the tip of Africa and, following the opening of the Suez Canal, through Egypt. The telegraph lines laid by the British Empire weren’t just technological achievements; they were instruments of control, both agents and products of imperialism.
The telegraph cables themselves embodied this colonial logic. They were coated in gutta-percha, a latex extracted from trees in the Malay Peninsula. “The empire basically extracted this latex, coated the telegraph lines in it and then ran these telegraph lines back to Southeast Asia and to other places to control, continue controlling those very territories and plantations,” Subramanian explained. The tool of empire was literally constituted by the resources of the territories it sought to dominate.
The one significant change in today’s cable map is the dense thicket in Southeast Asia and the China Sea—a visual representation of China’s emergence as an economic superpower. But otherwise, he noted pointedly, “there is no post-colonialism” when it comes to these pathways of power.
Big Tech’s Undersea Empire
Perhaps the most alarming development Subramanian documented is the recent consolidation of cable ownership. For decades, undersea cables were laid through consortiums of state-owned telecommunications agencies or by private investors. But approximately six years ago, the model shifted dramatically.
Today, four companies—Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon—dominate the undersea cable industry. “Two out of every three new cables are being laid by one of these four big tech companies,” Subramanian revealed. These companies, whose business models depend entirely on data flow, recognized that spending half a billion dollars to lay a transatlantic cable was trivial compared to their revenues and gave them unprecedented control over the internet’s physical infrastructure.
This consolidation raises profound questions about data privacy, consumer rights, and the concentration of power. “These companies now control so much else about the internet. They also control the backbone through which the internet travels,” he noted. When reminded that these four companies are all American and increasingly aligned with the current U.S. administration, the implications become even more troubling. “They will do anything it takes to remain in the good books of the Trump administration or whatever government is in power,” Subramanian observed.
The session took place just days after Trump’s inauguration, where photographs captured tech billionaires standing prominently beside the president—the same individuals whose companies now control the physical infrastructure through which the world’s data flows.
Tonga’s Digital Darkness
The genesis of Subramanian’s book came from reading about Tonga, an island nation in the South Pacific, whose single international undersea cable was severed by a massive volcanic eruption. The incident plunged the country into what he initially thought would be a return to the 1980s. “But actually, it’s been thrown back to the 1820s, to a pre-telegraph age, because there is no other form of communication.”
His visit to Tonga revealed the extent of our dependency on internet infrastructure. Banking ceased to function—not just ATMs, but even in-person transactions, as banks couldn’t access account information. One woman’s solar panels stopped working because they couldn’t connect to the internet for software updates, a problem endemic to “smart” devices from Tesla cars to home appliances.
The most Byzantine workaround involved banks on outlying islands: each morning, account information was downloaded onto a thumb drive and flown to the island. Transactions were conducted, the spreadsheet updated, and the drive flown back in the evening so the main database could be updated for the next day’s operations. “This was a kind of bizarre workaround they had to undergo,” Subramanian noted with dry understatement.
But Tonga, peripheral to the global economy, could survive through such improvisations. Taiwan presents a far more precarious case.
Taiwan: Where Geology Meets Geopolitics
With 15 international cables, Taiwan finds itself in an impossible position. To the east, Chinese vessels threaten what military strategists call “gray zone warfare”—acts of sabotage that fall short of outright military conflict. To the west, the region’s intense geological activity periodically triggers underwater landslides that sever cables instantly.
“If the island of Taiwan was suddenly taken off the internet map, think about what that means for their semiconductor manufacturing companies,” Subramanian said. Taiwan produces the chips that power global technology; disconnecting them would cascade through the world economy. More ominously, it would leave Taiwan defenseless against Chinese aggression.
The Taiwanese government, acutely aware of these vulnerabilities, invited Subramanian to discuss their “preeminent existential threat.” In the most telling revelation, they’re considering abandoning 150 years of transparency about cable coordinates—information published to prevent accidental damage by fishing vessels and shipping anchors. “They’re saying, we’re actually now actively thinking of taking that information off the public domain. And that really says something,” he observed.
Bifurcation of the Internet
Geopolitical tensions are creating what Subramanian called “a weird kind of small-scale bifurcation of the internet.” The U.S. has outlawed its cable companies from working on projects involving Chinese firms, banned cables manufactured by Chinese companies, and prohibited direct cables from China to California. Chinese internet traffic to the U.S. must now route through neutral jurisdictions like Singapore or the Philippines.
At least three cable projects have been abandoned entirely due to these regulations. Meanwhile, China has begun delaying permits for cables crossing the South China Sea—a crucial pathway for any Southeast Asian connectivity. The result is redundancy, but not the beneficial kind. “This is not the kind of redundancy people are seeking. It’s needless expense because of this bifurcation,” Subramanian explained.
The industry professionals he interviewed yearned for the 1990s and early 2000s, when cable projects were simply technical and commercial ventures, not geopolitical flashpoints.
Regulation Paradox
A central paradox emerged in the discussion: the internet’s infrastructure depends on openness and transparency to function, yet what happens within the internet increasingly demands regulation. International waters, where most cables run, exist in a jurisdictional void. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea provides minimal oversight and unclear enforcement mechanisms.
Subramanian posed a hypothetical: “If there is a terrorist attack out in the mid-Atlantic on a cable that is owned partly by Google and partly by another company, American and British, that lands in five different countries along its route, and the ship carrying these attackers is flagged in Liberia but crewed by Indians and captained by a Filipino—where is the jurisdiction? Who do you sue?”
Meanwhile, once cables reach shore, governments are intensely interested in the data flowing through them. Subramanian shared the story of Singapore Telecom’s cable to Madras in the early 2000s, which the Indian government delayed for a year while figuring out how to surveil the dramatically increased data flow, ultimately installing Israeli software at the landing station to monitor metadata.
“This has been happening for a long time,” he noted. “It happened in the Cold War with telephone cables and it’s happening now.” While end-to-end encryption might protect message content, metadata—who contacts whom, how frequently, which websites are visited—allows governments to construct detailed profiles of individuals.
The Human Element
What animated Subramanian’s research, as with all his work, was finding the human stories within technical systems. He attended a three-day conference in Madrid populated by cable industry obsessives, including a Japanese professor whose young son complained bitterly about family beach vacations devoted to locating manhole covers marking cable landing sites.
He tracked these professionals around the world, from data centers to repair ships, seeking to “put myself in the shoes of somebody else and see the world through their eyes.” The challenge, he acknowledged candidly, was that “once you’ve seen one data center, you’ve seen them all. It is just racks of servers in an air-conditioned room.”
Yet this mundane physical reality—cables, servers, cooling systems, landing stations—underpins everything we’ve come to depend on. When asked to imagine London with all its undersea cables severed, Subramanian painted a scenario where people couldn’t call an Uber, couldn’t reach relatives (even landlines now route through internet infrastructure), couldn’t check email or WhatsApp, and would find buses unable to run due to internet-dependent traffic management systems.
A World Underwater
The session concluded with questions from an engaged audience, but the central revelation remained: we have built our civilization on physical infrastructure we barely understand, controlled increasingly by a handful of corporations, running through jurisdictions where no meaningful regulation exists, vulnerable to both geological events and geopolitical sabotage.
Subramanian’s book, which will be published in India this April, traces its intellectual ancestry to Neal Stephenson’s 1996 Wired essay “Mother Earth, Mother Board”—a 40,000-word exploration of cable laying that Subramanian read on his iPhone 3 while walking to the grocery store, unable to put it down. Twenty-five years later, the internet Stephenson documented has become infinitely more central to human life, and the infrastructure supporting it infinitely more concentrated in fewer hands.
The session’s title, “Tangled Webs,” proved apt not just for the physical cables crisscrossing ocean floors, but for the complex interweaving of technology, commerce, geopolitics, and power that determines who connects to whom, and on whose terms. In an age when we speak glibly of being “connected,” Subramanian’s work reminds us that connection is never neutral—it is always mediated by cables, corporations, and the contested waters through which our data flows.
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