Report: China and Russia are stepping up efforts to control or influence undersea internet cable routes, raising concerns of backdoors and traffic interception
particularly in Beijing and Moscow — are stepping up their efforts to buy or influence companies responsible for laying the undersea cables that shuttle online communications between countries and servers (by @NPRDina) https://therecord.media/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This report extends a concern that has been building for a decade: as early as 2015, US officials flagged Russian naval activity near the undersea cables that carry most global internet data, worried they were rehearsing cuts rather than espionage. What has changed since is the vector — from cutting cables at sea to buying or influencing the companies that lay and maintain them.
The commercial backdrop sharpens the stakes. Chinese state-owned telecoms have been planning a $500M fiber-optic network linking Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, while US Big Tech's share of used subsea capacity has grown past 70%, per Bloomberg — meaning two state-aligned camps now sit on opposite sides of the same physical pipes. By 2024, US officials had escalated to directly warning Google and Meta that China-owned repair ships could tamper with cables.
First-order effects
- Cable consortia and their Big Tech backers face immediate vendor-vetting pressure: ownership of laying and repair companies becomes a security question, not a procurement one, since a compromised maintainer can access traffic at the point of repair.
Second-order effects
- Operators respond by splitting supply chains along geopolitical lines — routing new builds through trusted vendors and, as the later coverage shows, funding monitoring technology such as distributed acoustic sensing to detect tampering on routes they can no longer fully trust.
Third-order effects
- If influence-over-layers replaces cut-the-wire sabotage as the threat model, the industry structurally bifurcates into US-aligned and China-aligned cable systems, with countries caught between them — as Asia-Pacific states already fear in a Taiwan contingency — forced to buy connectivity twice or pick a side.
The trend: Subsea cable infrastructure is hardening into the next contested chokepoint of US-China technological rivalry, shifting the battleground from who owns capacity to who can touch the glass.