TehranIran claimed toll rights over Strait of Hormuz undersea cables.
FALCON and Gulf Bridge cables run through Iranian territorial waters; repair ships have avoided the strait since February, leaving faults unrepaired.
Tech firms face paying protection fees or accepting permanent cable degradation, maritime intelligence firm Windward said.
Sources: Ars Technica
THE INVISIBLE INFRASTRUCTURE
Roughly 99% of intercontinental data — banking, video, cloud sync, military command traffic — moves through about 550 submarine fiber-optic cables, not satellites. Each cable is the diameter of a garden hose, armored only in shallow water, and lies on the seabed where any anchor, trawler, or state actor can reach it.
WHY HORMUZ IS A DATA CHOKEPOINT TOO
Hormuz is famous for the 21 million barrels of oil that pass through daily, but the same 33-km gap funnels nearly all fiber between Europe and the Gulf states, India, and East Africa. FALCON loops around the Arabian Peninsula touching Iran's coast; Gulf Bridge stitches together every GCC capital. The deepwater channel hugs the Iranian side — which is why Tehran can credibly claim the cables sit in its waters.
HOW A CABLE GETS FIXED
There are roughly 60 cable repair ships in the world. A break is located by sending a test pulse and timing the reflection; the ship grapnels the cable, hauls both ends to the surface, splices in a new section, and lowers it back. The job takes one to four weeks — and the ship needs the coastal state's permission to enter territorial waters.
THE LEGAL GREY ZONE
UNCLOS Article 113 obliges states to criminalize breaking cables, and Article 79 grants the right to lay them on the continental shelf. But the convention is silent on whether a coastal state can charge a transit fee for cables already in its waters. Iran ratified UNCLOS in 1982 but never deposited it, leaving Tehran free to argue domestic law governs the seabed off Bandar Abbas.
THE PRECEDENT
Egypt has quietly charged transit fees on Red Sea cables landing at Suez for decades — by some industry estimates, a meaningful share of every Europe-Asia packet pays Cairo en route. The Egyptian model is the template Tehran is now invoking: not seizure, not sabotage, just a toll booth on a route nobody can avoid.
THE HARVEST RISK
A cable that lands on a hostile coast can be tapped, not just taxed. The 1971 Ivy Bells operation showed the US Navy splicing onto Soviet undersea military cables in the Sea of Okhotsk; the technology has only become easier since. Tech firms paying Iran for repair access are also implicitly accepting whatever monitoring sits on the splice.
WHO LOSES FIRST
GCC banks, Indian outsourcers, and East African mobile networks route most traffic through these cables. Big Tech can degrade gracefully — rerouting via the Mediterranean adds latency but keeps services running. The Gulf landing economies cannot reroute themselves; their entire digital economy sits on the same few strands.