Samanth Subramanian

This, of course, goes along with the fact that there's plenty of other anxiety about geopolitical conflict in this day and age.

But I think...

Countries and governments are acutely aware that this is one extremely effective way of crippling economies that a malicious actor could undertake at virtually no or little expense.

Well, one thing to do is to build out more redundancy.

And I don't mean just lay more cables.

If you look at the map of the telegraph cables of the late 1800s and you look at the current map of undersea cables, you see that they're kind of similar.

I mean, they're almost the same, except for this big new thicket of undersea data cables that has come up in East Asia and Southeast Asia.

And part of the reason for that is out of habit or inertia or reasons of cost efficiency, cables still land in pretty much the same places that they did 100 years ago.

So I'm from India, for example, and many, if not all, of the undersea data cables that land in India today

land in Mumbai on the West Coast or Chennai on the East Coast.

And that's exactly where the telegraph cables used to land a century ago.

I asked many people as to why this is.

And, you know, it's just easier.

You have the data centers there already.

There's economies of scale.

So all you have to do is just get an extra cable on there and you have the rest of the infrastructure ready to go.

But maybe your solution lies in finding other places to land, other places in which this data infrastructure can be protected.

That's one option.

The other option is exactly what you said right now, which is to find alternate routes.

But this is not easy either.