Hidden Cables—Global Risk

We imagine the internet as invisible—wireless, ethereal, everywhere and nowhere. The truth is far more precarious. Nearly 95% of global data moves through 900,000 miles of fiber optic cable lying unprotected on the ocean floor, controlled increasingly by four American tech giants. When Tonga's single cable was severed in 2022, ATMs went dark and the country vanished from the world. That was an accident. Samanth Subramanian, author of The Web Beneath the Waves, reveals that what comes next might not be.