Samanth Subramanian

But even more than that, I think people in the industry start to worry about

that something like a bifurcation of the internet is gonna start setting in.

By which I mean that if there's a particular part of the world that needs cabling and the Americans wanna cable it but don't want Chinese involvement and the Chinese want to cable it as well, there will essentially be two parallel cable systems running in that part of the world.

Now, this isn't parallel in the sense of redundancy.

This is parallel in the sense of superfluity.

You don't need both of them, and yet you have both of them.

And so what happens to the internet there?

Does it get fractured and split along these two cable systems?

What then happens to the promise of the internet, which, as we said, was conceived as a free and open access kind of system to link the world?

And so I think there are people in the industry who talk to me quite a bit about their anxieties for just how the internet might be bifurcated this way.

I mean, people within the industry seem to think so.

And I think governments seem to think so as well.

And so we've seen...

And amping up by many degrees of the kinds of protective measures that governments and companies accord to these cables.

So the UK, where I live right now, a few years ago, they announced that they would have two military naval vessels permanently on patrol around the island.

to protect not just undersea data cables, but also power cables and oil and gas pipelines.

The Baltic nations and the Scandinavian nations have their coast guard patrols on higher alert than ever before because they think Russian ships are out there to cut these cables in acts of what is known as gray zone warfare.

The Taiwanese government is paranoid that China will eventually, in some kind of act of war,

cut every single one of the 15 internet cables coming from overseas that land on Taiwanese shores.

So I think there's like a real anxiety surrounding this particular act of malicious damage.