Argentina has quietly become one of South America's busiest landing markets for subsea fibre, and 2026 made that visible. Google's Firmina cable — a 13,500-kilometre system running from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to Las Toninas on the Buenos Aires coast, with branches to Punta del Este and Praia Grande — completed its Argentine landing this year, the longest cable in the world able to run on a single power feed. It joins Malbec, Tannat, SAm-1 and ARBR at the same stretch of beach. The policy lesson is not that Argentina needs heavier subsea-cable rules. It is that a permissive, predictable authorization regime did its job — and that the genuine vulnerability now is geographic, not regulatory.
A permit regime that mostly stays out of the way
Argentina regulates subsea cables through a single, narrow gate. Under Article 6 of Telecommunications Law No. 19,798, anyone installing or expanding communications infrastructure on national territory needs prior authorization, and the national regulator ENACOM processes those requests through a dedicated submarine-cable permit (trámite t87). The applicant files a project memorandum, system architecture, capacity, and an installation schedule; ENACOM authorizes the landing.
That is roughly where the state's involvement ends. ENACOM authorized Google's Firmina system on 9 August 2022, and the cable was built, laid, and landed without the kind of national-security screening, ownership-vetting, or licensing-tax regime that now characterises subsea policy in the United States and the EU. The result is a market that attracted four hyperscaler-grade systems to one country in under a decade — Malbec (Google/GlobeNet), Tannat, ARBR, and now Firmina — each adding international capacity that Argentine networks, data centres, and consumers draw on directly.
The deregulation backdrop
The Firmina landing arrives inside a broader deregulatory push. Through Decree 938/2025, published in the Official Gazette on 2 January 2026, the Milei government extended its intervention of ENACOM for another year and reaffirmed a pricing model in which licensees set their own "fair and reasonable" prices rather than submitting to state tariff caps — a return to the free-competition logic of the Argentine Digital Law. In February, ENACOM Resolution 57/2026 (Official Gazette, 26 February 2026) replaced direct state testing of telecom equipment with accredited certification agencies issuing conformity certificates against ISO/IEC standards, effective 1 September 2026.
Neither measure is subsea-cable policy as such. But together they signal the regulatory posture cable investors price in: predictable approvals, no price controls, and a state that is shrinking its discretionary footprint. For a capital-intensive, multi-year asset like a transoceanic cable, that predictability is worth more than any subsidy.
Steelmanning the case for more oversight
The strongest argument for a heavier hand is real and worth stating plainly. Subsea cables carry the overwhelming majority of a country's international data; they are physically exposed, hard to repair, and increasingly treated as strategic infrastructure subject to interception, sabotage, and foreign-ownership concerns. Washington's proposed Strategic Subsea Cables Act of 2026 and the FCC's second cable-licensing order both reflect a global shift toward screening cable ownership and routing for national-security risk. A government that authorizes a landing with little more than a technical memorandum has limited tools if a cable's owner, route, or repair dependency later becomes a liability. That is a legitimate gap.
The question is whether the answer is gatekeeping at the permit stage — and here the evidence cuts against over-correction. Argentina's exposure is not that it approved too many cables. It is that it landed almost all of them in the same place.
The actual risk: Las Toninas as a single point
Las Toninas — a sparsely populated coastal town chosen for its wide beach and proximity to Buenos Aires — is described domestically as the "kilometre zero of the Argentine internet" because nearly every international cable serving the country comes ashore there. Firmina, Malbec, Tannat, SAm-1 and ARBR all converge on that one landing zone. A localised event — an anchor strike on the cluster, a power or backhaul failure at the landing stations, a natural disaster, or coordinated sabotage — would degrade a large share of Argentina's international connectivity at once. Cable diversity on paper does not equal resilience when the cables share a beach.
Proportionate policy follows directly from this. Rather than adding ownership screens or licensing friction that would deter the next system, ENACOM and the government should:
- Actively enable a second landing region — incentivise or fast-track permits for cables coming ashore away from Las Toninas (the Patagonian or northern Atlantic coast), so a single incident cannot sever the country.
- Treat physical resilience, not ownership, as the security priority — landing-station hardening, protected-zone enforcement against anchoring and trawling, and pre-arranged repair-vessel access matter more for Argentine users than vetting cable consortia.
- Keep the permit regime fast and predictable — the very feature that attracted Firmina is the one that can be used to redirect the next cable toward geographic diversity.
The takeaway
Argentina's subsea record is a quiet vindication of light-touch, evidence-based infrastructure policy: a narrow Article 6 permit, no price controls, and a credible deregulatory trajectory pulled in world-class capacity that the state could never have built itself. The mature next step is not to bolt national-security gatekeeping onto a system that is working, but to fix the one structural weakness that market incentives alone won't solve — the dangerous elegance of routing a nation's internet through a single beach.