Meta's Waterworth Subsea Cable is About Geopolitics and Geoeconomics

 

[By Ravi Nayyar]

Announced on 14 February, Meta’s Project Waterworth is not just proposed to be the world’s longest submarine cable but reflects ever-shifting geopolitical and geoeconomic landscapes. It presents a great opportunity for Australia to collaborate more with its regional partners, especially India and the Pacific countries, on technologies keeping us online.

For Meta, this addition to subsea infrastructure is slated to open a chance to monetize accelerating international data flows. In developing and running this cable, Meta also seeks to prioritise its own traffic and minimise latency for its and its partners’ infrastructure and services. No surprises there.

But what is different this time is the clear recognition of intense geostrategic competition featuring both state and non-state actors. Connecting five continents, the proposed route, longer than the circumference of the planet, avoids areas subject to malign influence or control, such as the Baltic, Red and South China seas. Meta plans to lay as much of the cable as possible in deep water, making it harder for malicious actors to spy on or sabotage it.

Perhaps an even bigger takeaway is Meta’s choice of locations for cable landing points: the coastlines of three BRICS countries (India, South Africa and Brazil) and three Quad countries (India, Australia and the United States). With India being in both groupings, the route particularly reflects India’s rise as a digital, geopolitical and economic power. Meta has specifically said the cable will support India’s continued rise in the digital realm. With the world’s largest population, India is both a massive source of data to train Meta’s AI products and an emerging hub for data centres.

More broadly, Meta is seeking to be a bigger player in the submarine cable industry, and thus in geopolitics, competing with fellow US hyperscalers Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Indeed, those three companies and Meta represent about three quarters of active submarine cable capacity worldwide. Meta seeks to go one better by, as it said, ‘opening three new oceanic corridors’ with Project Waterworth.

Meta knows how the geostrategic significance of submarine cables is causing the technology’s politicisation, reflecting an ongoing split between the anti-China and pro-China camps in telecommunications amid the larger Sino-US technological rivalry.

As a US technology company, Meta arguably seeks to reinforce its value as a member of the anti-China camp, alongside Google, Microsoft and Amazon. It would see Project Waterworth as a downpayment on support from Western and partner governments (such as finance, easier regulatory approvals and oversight, and more robust diplomatic and operational support) to help counter Chinese influence in digital infrastructure, especially in the Global South.

In this context, Meta must beware cyber supply-chain risks that can arise from its and its operating partners using: Chinese equipment at any point in the technology stack; and unvetted remote access applications, managed security service providers and managed network service providers.

Rising cyber threats around telecommunications infrastructure underline the importance of such cyber supply chain risk management. In 2022, cybercriminals attacked the servers of the operator of a submarine cable that connected Hawaii with the Pacific. Chinese state-sponsored hackers have compromised US terrestrial telecommunications infrastructure for espionage and pre-positioning malicious capabilities to be deployed during a major security crisis (such as a Taiwan contingency).

Indeed, such are the risks to submarine cables that the US  Federal Communications Commission has proposed reforms to its regulatory regime. These changes relate to: cyber risk management by operators; banning certain hardware or software from regulated cables and their infrastructure; risks from remote access solutions; and cable operators reporting their use of managed network service providers.

While Project Waterworth may seem like just another planned cable by another Big Tech company, Australia should be paying attention because a cable landing point in northern Australia has been proposed. Meta’s plan reinforces the extraordinary significance of the maritime domain for Australia, with more than a dozen submarine cables already connecting us with the world via the Indian and Pacific Oceans. India’s role as a landing site is also important as Australia seeks to continue boosting economic and technology ties with New Delhi.

Project Waterworth also allows for further cyber diplomacy with Pacific partners. The project could bolster Pacific connectivity and cyber resilience through branches to Pacific countries, complementing Google’s efforts through the Pacific Connect Initiative.

The project further offers Australia the opportunity to work with regional partners to tackle regulatory fragmentation and boost operational collaboration on submarine cables. For example, the Australian Communications and Media Authority should engage regional counterparts to identify opportunities to harmonise and expand regulatory regimes, such as for cable repair and by mandating transparency from operators around cable damage (as ASPI’s Jocelinn Kang and Jessie Jacob have recommended). Canberra should work with regional partners to also increase information-sharing on risks around cables traversing exclusive economic zones. The Cable Connectivity and Resilience Centre of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade could help mediate such engagement, while the Australian Cyber Security Centre and Cyber and Infrastructure Security Centre could provide expert advice to inform policy on the operational resilience of submarine cable infrastructure

Project Waterworth reflects our brave new world, especially its contested digital and maritime domains, and the opportunity for Australia to collaborate further with regional partners to keep us all online.

Ravi Nayyar is a fellow and research contributor at ASPI, associate fellow at the Social Cyber Institute, and a PhD Scholar at the University of Sydney. This article appears courtesy of The Strategist and may be found in its original form here.