In a recent article for the Financial Times about technology companies investing in subsea cables, Elisabeth Braw raises a series of concerns that seem difficult to square with the realities of the digital markets these cables support.
First, Braw describes these cables as serving the companies’ own needs, but those companies sell their capacity onto the wider market through public cloud and other enterprise and consumer services. While it might be technology companies that are the immediate users of new subsea cables, we all benefit from access to improved services. These are ‘tools to compete’ for British companies.
She also makes the fashionable claim that the UK should be concerned about dependence on the United States.
Calls for “sovereignty” in the technology sector are fraught at the best of times. There is absolutely a place for a positive agenda to ease regulatory barriers, for example, to the UK playing a larger role in the global technology sector.
Realistically, though, no country is ever going to be truly independent of others without paying a punishing economic price; global value chains are too complex and interdependent. If the U.S. or China still depend on other countries for all kinds of inputs and markets for their devices and services, there is no way the UK can realistically become a technological island without impoverishing ourselves. Protectionism will only undermine the competitiveness of British businesses, worsen outcomes in our public services and increase costs for British consumers.
These problems are particularly acute when the logic of tech sovereignty is applied to subsea cables. The whole point of a subsea cable is that it is connecting two countries. Sovereign subsea cables would be useless by definition, a digital bridge to nowhere.
Ownership is also not the most important indicator. In theory, either of the two countries connected by any subsea cable could sever that physical connection regardless of where the owners are headquartered. Niceties such as corporate structure go out of the window in the nightmare scenarios that some alarmist claims about Europe’s need for tech sovereignty conjure.
Back in the real world, if either country cut subsea cables that would mean incurring huge costs themselves. That is why the serious malicious threat is hostile third parties, not the connected countries. Of course, there are also many more mundane risks to subsea cables from fishing to anchors. Actual security is best served by more investment, building more diverse connections and therefore resilience, and responding more effectively to external threats.
The article gave the false impression that technology company investments are a new, worrying alternative to other sources of investment.
An overwhelming majority of subsea cables are already privately-owned. With new technologies only increasing the opportunities for mutually-beneficial exchanges of data, overall capacity is not fixed. Existing capacity does not go away because technology companies invest and they often are investing as part of consortia with partners such as telcos. As the European Subsea Cables Association put it:
“Investment by hyperscalers is not crowding out traditional cable development.
Telecommunications carriers, infrastructure funds and consortiums continue to invest in international connectivity, while governments remain free to fund strategic projects where national interests require it. Private investment does not remove public sector options which have always existed and will continue to do so.”
Most new systems on European routes are developed and operated as jointly-owned, risk-sharing collaborations between telcos, cloud providers and content providers. Costs and capacity are shared in proportion to investment.
There are real risks if we start to impede this kind of investment. Regulatory barriers to deploying, maintaining, and repairing cables in Indonesia, for example, raise costs, slow deployment, and constrain improvements in infrastructure, creating costs ultimately borne by Indonesian consumers and businesses as much as the U.S. operators serving the market. As of February 2026, Indonesia ranked 115th out of 154 countries for fixed broadband speeds on the Speedtest Global Index, placing it in the lower-middle tier of Southeast Asia and well behind regional peers such as Singapore, Malaysia, and Vietnam. Absent reforms to the regulatory environment governing subsea cables, that gap will be difficult to close.
For the UK, among the world’s largest exporters of digitally-delivered services, to go down that road should be unthinkable. Our goal should indeed be to complement subsea cable investment with stronger satellite connectivity. The UK could play an important role here by supporting the modernisation of outdated interference rules being negotiated at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in the coming year.
More investment in global connectivity is simply a good thing, particularly in the context of concerns about the vulnerability of undersea cables.
