In March 2024, several countries in East Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia began experiencing strange internet outages and massive slowdowns in digital services. The origin was not in a cyber attack or an electrical blackout, it was on a ship reached during an attack in the Red Sea that had accidentally dragged its anchor onto the seabed and damaged several undersea cables essential for global communications.
Iran’s plan B. For decades, the Strait of Hormuz was seen as the great bottleneck energy of the planet, the route through which much of the world’s oil circulates. It happens that the war with the United States and Israel has made Iran discover something much more important: the Internet also circulates under those waters.
As? Apparently, CNN told that Tehran has understood that the submarine cables that connect Europe, Asia and the Gulf are an infrastructure as strategic as oil tankers, and it wants to convert that geographical position into a new source of power. The idea that begins to emerge in Iranian discourse is very clear: if the world needs to pass data under Hormuz, large technology companies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft or Meta should accept some kind of tolllicense or submission to Iranian rules. In other words, Hormuz would no longer be just a lever about global energybut also about the digital economy.
The invisible cables. The great Iranian strategic discovery is born from an inconspicuous reality: almost all global traffic data depends on physical cables laid on the seabed. Banking payments, cloud services, military communications, streaming platforms, stock market operations and much of the artificial intelligence infrastructure pass through them.
Some of these cables cross areas near Iranian waters, especially in the Persian Gulf. Although many of the international routes were designed to directly avoid Iranian territory, Tehran understands that proximity is enough to put pressure. The regime has understood that interrupting or threatening these corridors could generate enormous economic and psychological damage, even without firing a missile.
The threat of submarine warfare. At this point it should be noted that Iran has not promised to sabotage cables directly, but it has launched deliberately ambiguous messages about possible interruptions or damages. Precisely this ambiguity is part of the strategy.
The country has underwater drones, mini-submarines and capable naval forces to operate in the Gulfwhile its regional allies have already accidentally demonstrated in the Red Sea the enormous impact that a simple underwater incident. The real Western fear is not, therefore, a total internet blackout, but rather a chain of disruptions: financial delays, problems in data centers, degradation of business networks or difficulties in repairing critical infrastructure in the middle of a military crisis. In a world completely dependent on data, touching these cables means little less than touching the global economy.
The inspiration of the Suez Canal. Tehran clearly looks to the Suez Canal as a model. Egypt has been monetizing for decades its strategic position by charging tolls and taking advantage of the passage of submarine cables between Europe and Asia. Iran wants to partially replicate that logic, although applied to a much more hostile and militarized environment.
In fact, the media linked to the Revolutionary Guard they already talk about compulsory licenses, passage fees and exclusive rights for Iranian companies in charge of maintenance. Legally the scenario is complex and many operators will probably ignore the threats while US sanctions are in place, but the simple fact that Iran is openly raising this idea demonstrates how it has changed his strategic vision on Hormuz.
The new discovered power. In short, and as we have already seen with crude oil, what is truly important is not whether Iran will one day manage to collect money from the big Western technology companies, but rather that it has discovered a new form of pressure global.
For years, Tehran believed that its greatest weapon it was oil. Now you have understood that the world depends even more on invisible data flows that happen under the sea. That is possibly the great geopolitical transformation that Hormuz is currently revealing: a classic maritime strait is also becoming a critical point for the global digital economy. And that means that future international tensions will no longer revolve solely around the control of energy, that too, but also the control of the infrastructure that supports nothing more and nothing less than the internet.
Image | Nara, Wikimedia, Collinpetty
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