After the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has turned its attention to one of the “hidden arteries of the global economy“ – the undersea cables laid under this waterway, which carry huge volumes of internet traffic and financial transactions between Europe, Asia and the Persian Gulf, CNN reports.
Tehran wants to charge the world's largest technology companies for using the undersea internet cables laid under the strait.
“We will charge fees for internet cables“, Iranian military spokesman Ebrahim Zolfaghari told X last week.
According to CNN, citing media outlets affiliated with Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Tehran's plan is to require companies such as Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon to comply with Iranian law, while also requiring companies laying the undersea cables to pay licensing fees. The cables will be maintained exclusively by Iranian companies.
Some of these companies have invested in cables that cross the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, but it is unclear whether they pass through Iranian waters. It is also unclear how Tehran will force technology giants to comply if they are banned from making payments to Iran due to US sanctions, the channel notes.
Several major intercontinental submarine cables pass through the Strait of Hormuz. International operators avoid Iranian waters, concentrating most of their cables in a narrow strip on the Omani side of the waterway, said Mostafa Ahmed, a senior research fellow at the Habtoor Research Center in the United Arab Emirates.
However, two of these cables, the Falcon and the Gulf Bridge International (GBI), pass through Iranian territorial waters, said Alan Maudlin of TeleGeography, a telecommunications research company.
Ahmed warned that any attack by the IRGC on the cables could cause a cascading “digital catastrophe” across several continents. He noted that the strait is a key digital corridor between Asian data centers such as Singapore and some telecommunications hubs in Europe. Any disruptions could slow trade and cross-border transactions between Europe and Asia and could cause internet outages in parts of East Africa.
However, TeleGeography noted that “cables crossing the Strait of Hormuz will account for less than 1% of the world's total bandwidth capacity by 2025“