Private capital is rebuilding the geography of the internet faster than any treaty body can. A 7 October 2026 Rest of World report says Google, Meta and Microsoft are paying steep prices for backup routes around the Red Sea, where more than 90% of data capacity between Europe and Asia runs through cables under the water. The market is responding quickly. The policy framework underneath it is not.
What the report says
The cables enter the Red Sea at Bab al-Mandab, a strait less than 32 kilometres wide between Yemen and Djibouti and Eritrea. Rest of World reports that the Houthis seized Yemen's side of the strait in September, including the island of Mayyun, and that Saudi-backed government forces said on 5 October they had retaken key positions near the strait and the port of Mocha. The Houthis denied that claim.
The commercial response is already visible. In September, Google reportedly bought a pair of fibre strands along Turkish state pipelines, paying two to three times the roughly 6 million euros that newer lines crossing Turkey are expected to cost. That price comes from a person familiar with the deal. Iraq signed a contract with Ooredoo on 10 September to carry data toward Europe through an underground route from the port of Al-Faw. Google and Meta have begun sending live traffic over a land route across Iraq that was previously held as a backup. Microsoft has committed more than $400 million to subsea and land links across the Middle East by 2030.
The case for treating this as a regulatory emergency
The strongest argument for heavy intervention is that the risk is concentrated and systemic. When one chokepoint carries most of a continent-to-continent route, a single failure becomes a regional outage. Governments in the Gulf, East Africa and South Asia depend on that capacity for banking, health and public services, yet they have little say over where private cable consortia route traffic. A regulator could reasonably conclude that markets underprice this tail risk and that mandated diversity, state-backed redundancy or security reviews of every route are justified.
Why the market is already doing the work
The reported deals suggest otherwise. Firms with the most to lose are paying a large premium for diversity without being told to. A 2–3x price on Turkish fibre is a market signal that redundancy is scarce, and that signal is pulling capital toward Iraq, Turkey and the wider Middle East. Prescriptive mandates risk freezing today's definition of a safe route just as the map is changing. A mandate drafted in 2024 would have named the Red Sea corridor as the thing to diversify into, not around.
The weakness is that terrestrial routes are not a free substitute. Land fibre crosses several jurisdictions, is exposed to its own conflicts and cuts, and in Iraq's case runs through a country still building its wholesale market. Rest of World itself notes the cloud giants are paying for a backup, not a perfect fix. That is a reason to widen the set of routes, not to lock in a single alternative.
Where public policy does matter
The 2024 Red Sea episode showed that the binding constraint is often permission, not money. Three cables, AAE-1, Seacom and EIG, were severed in late February 2024 by the anchor of a cargo ship sunk by Houthi forces. According to gCaptain, repair permits were hard to obtain because Yemen's rival authorities each controlled access. The internationally recognised southern government opened a criminal investigation into TeleYemen's alleged ties to the Houthis, which blocked the AAE-1 consortium's first permit request. Months of negotiation followed. AAE-1 came back online in mid-July 2024, and Seacom and EIG were still being repaired at that point. No amount of capital shortened that timeline.
The international legal baseline is thin. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea gives all states the right to lay cables on the high seas under Article 112. Article 113 requires states to criminalise wilful or negligent damage to cables by their own ships and nationals. It does not address armed conflict, repair access or who may authorise a repair vessel to enter contested waters. Those are precisely the gaps the Red Sea exposed.
A proportionate agenda
The ITU's International Advisory Body for Submarine Cable Resilience, created with the International Cable Protection Committee in November 2024, is the natural venue. It has 42 members from operators, governments and maritime authorities. Its two-year initial term ends around November 2026, and its stated goals include faster recovery after disruptions and more redundancy. That timing creates a decision point. Three measures would help without constraining the market:
- Repair-access protocols. Governments and conflict parties should agree in advance on a fast-track, neutral process for repair-ship permits, so a cable fault does not become a bargaining chip.
- Shared route transparency. Voluntary, aggregated reporting on where capacity is concentrated would let operators and regulators see chokepoints without publishing sensitive cable locations.
- Streamlined cross-border fibre permitting. If land corridors through Turkey, Iraq and neighbouring states are going to carry more of the world's traffic, wholesale access and right-of-way rules in those states should be predictable and open to competing carriers rather than reserved for state incumbents.
The one thing to avoid is a new layer of route-approval requirements that slows private investment. Hyperscalers are putting real money into new paths, and the Microsoft figure alone suggests the investment is arriving. What operators cannot buy is certainty that a repair ship will be allowed to sail. That is a job for governments, and the ITU body has a short window to show it can do it.
Bottom line
The reported premiums are evidence that private actors price this risk better than a mandate would. They are not evidence that the public side has nothing left to do. Capital can build around a chokepoint, but only diplomacy and clear rules can get a broken cable fixed.
A caveat on sourcing: the Google price comes from an anonymous source in a single report, and the Iraq and Microsoft details are as reported by Rest of World. The territorial situation around Bab al-Mandab is disputed and moving.