A while back I wrote about [[Unveiling the Subsea Secrets - The Intricate Dance of Cables, Control, and Connectivity in the Digital Age]] and [[Submarine cables - The veins of our digital world and the battle for control]] # Iran and the Strait of Hormuz Cable Crisis Iran announced it will impose fees on undersea cables running through the Strait of Hormuz — naming Meta, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft directly. State media is claiming exclusive rights to repair and maintain the cables. Repair ships haven't been able to enter since the war started in February. The four [[Hyperscalers]] are now routing around it via an overland fibre route through Iraq (built by IQ Networks alongside pipeline corridors). ## Why this is a bigger deal than it sounds The governing treaty is the **1884 Convention for the Protection of Submarine Telegraph Cables** — written for telegraph wires and barely touched since. Iran is exploiting a grey zone that has existed for 140 years, because nobody expected these cables to matter this much when the treaty was written. The FALCON and Gulf Bridge cables both transit Iranian territorial waters. The ownership picture makes it worse. Before 2012, [[Hyperscalers]] used less than 10% of international subsea capacity. By 2024, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon controlled **71%**. These aren't shared public goods with common carriage obligations. They're private lines that benefit four American companies. A country at war is now claiming the right to tax the portion running through its waters — and the legal framework to push back is a Victorian-era telegraph convention. ## The chokepoint precedent If Iran succeeds, every coastal nation sitting on a cable chokepoint notices. Indonesia, Egypt, Singapore — dozens of others. This is the same dynamic as the [[Silver Refining Chokepoint]]: infrastructure that was quietly concentrated over decades suddenly becomes a weapon when the political moment arrives. Nobody worried about China refining 70% of global silver until they needed a lever to pull. The underlying [[Optical Fibers]] and [[Dark Fiber]] running across these routes are now strategic assets in a way that [[Geopolitical Capital Flows]] hadn't fully priced in. The "cables are public goods" assumption was always fiction — [[Hyperscalers]] made them private infrastructure. Iran is just the first to act on what that means. ## The broader signal This connects directly to [[Sovereign AI Positioning]]. Countries increasingly want control of their own critical infrastructure. Not just AI compute and data — the physical pipes that move bits across borders. The hyperscalers built the internet's plumbing and called it neutral. It was never neutral; it was just uncontested. That era is ending. The overland Iraq route is a workaround, not a solution. If the precedent holds, the question isn't whether other chokepoint nations will follow — it's when. --- Related: [[Hyperscalers]] | [[Dark Fiber]] | [[Optical Fibers]] | [[Silver Refining Chokepoint]] | [[Geopolitical Capital Flows]] | [[Sovereign AI Positioning]] | [[Wavelength Division Multiplexing - WDM]]