⛴️Cable Games: What’s Slowing Down the Internet’s Most Important Pathways

In three separate incidents late last year and early 2025, underwater cables (which traditionally carry internet data, financial data, telecommunications, cloud data, and even military information in limited instances) were severed or damaged in the Baltic Sea. A few years earlier, underwater cables carrying internet service to Taiwan were also severed.

While oceans away, these incidents have raised concerns around American data security and the commercial interests of American companies that deliver internet and telecommunications connectivity around the world — including here at home.

Our world is now a digital one and these cables can serve as the backbone of the internet by “carrying about 95 percent of intercontinental global internet traffic” — making sabotage to this data infrastructure an increasingly rich target. We’ve already seen attempts to corrupt connectivity infrastructure at power stations through both physical and cyber attacks.

Damage to these data delivery pipelines could be crippling to the tasks we look to perform everyday.

The answer to this concern is cable resiliency. What that means: more routes in which underwater cables can be laid.

Off the California coast, those available routes are shrinking, thanks to the proliferation of National Marine Sanctuaries and monuments. Today, most of the California coast is a marine sanctuary.

As you can imagine, laying a cable in a marine sanctuary is incredibly burdensome. In fact, one hasn’t been laid since 1999. In addition to the standard undersea cable permitting and regulatory approval process that can include up to seven government agencies, laying a cable in a sanctuary requires duplicate government action — something called a Special Use Permit (SUP), which is administered by NOAA.

These permits can take years to obtain and only come with a five year license (a typical FCC license for an underwater cable is 25 years). Meaning, if you manage to get a SUP, you’ll have to quickly turn around and go through the process again.

There are a couple issues at play here:

First — the proliferation of sanctuaries. We love our wildlife. But past Democratic administrations have vastly increased the acreage of marine monuments and sanctuaries in order to limit commercial activity. In 2015, President Obama expanded the acreage of the Cordell Bank and Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuaries by 2.5 times the original designation.

And second — given the burden to get a special use permit, companies are opting to find alternative routes. Those routes could lead to Mexico — where many datacenters are run by Huawei.

The House Natural Resources Committee is working on a solution to this predicament. This week they advanced the Undersea Cable Protection Act, authored by Rep. Buddy Carter which would “amend the National Marine Sanctuaries Act—ensuring that undersea fiber‑optic cables can be installed, maintained, or repaired in marine sanctuaries without requiring additional federal authorization (i.e. Special Use Permit), provided they have already received approval from another state/federal agency”.

This isn’t (or at least shouldn’t be) a partisan issue. In August 2024, NOAA suspended for two years the requirement for Special Use Permits for commercial undersea cables in newly designated marine sanctuaries, signaling broad regulatory consensus that current permitting rules need reform.

Doing so would make available safe and efficient routes for new underwater cables, thus securing the physical lifeline of our digital work — a worthy cause for full House consideration.

Critical Minerals: From G7 Consensus to American Action

The convergence of international agreement and early domestic implementation of President Trump’s April 24 Executive Order on offshore critical mineral extraction sets the tone for America's accelerated pivot toward resource dominance.

G7 Commitment Meets Trump Execution 

The G7 Critical Minerals Action Plan, announced June 17 in Alberta, establishes the framework for Western resource security. The agreement commits to "transparency, diversification, security, sustainable mining practices, trustworthiness and reliability as essential principles for resilient critical minerals supply chains."

The G7 explicitly acknowledges that "non-market policies and practices in the critical minerals sector threaten our ability to acquire many critical minerals, including the rare earth elements needed for magnets, that are vital for industrial production." Translation: China's state-directed dominance poses an existential threat to Western technological independence.

America Moves from Words to Action

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement are updating policies across all stages of development to reduce delays, improve coordination and provide greater certainty for industry.

BOEM is set to extend early-stage exploration permits to five years from three years, apply streamlined environmental reviews, and charged with minimizing "unnecessary paperwork and compliance steps" to fast-track approvals for mapping, testing, and site development.

Most significantly, BOEM will start identifying potential development areas without first issuing formal requests for information or forming joint task forces — rhyming with the need Secretary Burgum spoke of at an ALFA event earlier this year “Map, Baby, Map!”.

G7 allies committed to September follow-up conferences and roadmap development by year-end, and America is already mapping seabeds and streamlining permits. The executive order requires multiple agencies to deliver feasibility reports on everything from National Defense Stockpile utilization to international benefit-sharing mechanisms.

Why it Matters

Resource extraction is upstream of technological sovereignty. America will lead through action, which happens to also drive consensus among like-minded friends and allies.

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Thanks for reading and have a great day.

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