TEHRAN – Iran is extending its strategy of asymmetric warfare from the surface of the sea to the ocean floor, targeting the fiber-optic cables that power the global internet and financial systems.
Following a successful wartime blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, Tehran is now signaling its intent to monetize and potentially disrupt the subsea arteries that carry vast amounts of data between Europe, Asia, and the Persian Gulf. The move marks a strategic pivot, as the Islamic Republic seeks to convert its geographic proximity to one of the world’s most critical chokepoints into long-term economic and diplomatic leverage.
The plan involves imposing licensing fees on the world’s largest technology firms for the use of cables traversing Iranian waters. State-linked media and military officials have vaguely threatened that traffic could be disrupted if companies fail to comply with Iranian law, casting the proposal as both a revenue measure and a tool of deterrence.
“We will impose fees on internet cables,” Iranian military spokesperson Ebrahim Zolfaghari declared on X last week.
The proposal specifically targets giants such as Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon. Under the envisioned framework, submarine cable companies would be required to pay passage fees, while rights for the repair and maintenance of this infrastructure would be granted exclusively to Iranian firms. Diplomats and industry officials say that would effectively give Tehran an unprecedented gatekeeper role over some of the region’s most sensitive digital infrastructure, with implications for sanctions policy, cybersecurity, and crisis management.
The Geography of Digital Vulnerability
While the Strait of Hormuz is primarily recognized as the world’s most vital oil corridor, it also serves as a critical digital bridge. However, the physical layout of this infrastructure reflects decades of geopolitical distrust.
To mitigate security risks associated with Iran, international operators have historically clustered the majority of cables in a narrow band along the Omani side of the waterway. Despite these precautions, specific high-capacity lines remain vulnerable.
- Falcon and Gulf Bridge International (GBI): Two major intercontinental cables that traverse Iranian territorial waters and connect landing points in the Gulf to hubs in South Asia and Europe.
- Regional Impact: Disruptions would most severely affect the Persian Gulf states and India, the latter of which relies heavily on these corridors for its multi-billion-dollar outsourcing and back-office industries.
- Global Bandwidth: As of 2025, cables in the Strait of Hormuz account for less than 1% of total global international bandwidth, though they remain indispensable for regional stability and redundancy.
The threat is not merely financial. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) possesses a sophisticated suite of underwater capabilities, including combat divers, miniature submarines, and autonomous underwater drones capable of locating and severing cables. Western naval planners have long treated those capabilities as a latent risk; Tehran’s new fee proposal is being read in some capitals as a signal that it is prepared to link that military leverage explicitly to peacetime commercial flows.
Mostafa Ahmed, a senior researcher at the UAE-based Habtoor Research Center, warns that such an attack could trigger a cascading “digital catastrophe.” Beyond slowing internet speeds, sabotage could paralyze banking systems, military communications, and AI cloud infrastructure, forcing governments to activate contingency plans for everything from air traffic control to emergency services.
“It aims to impose such a hefty cost on the global economy that no-one will dare attack Iran again,” said Dina Esfandiary, Middle East lead at Bloomberg Economics.
Legal Precedents and the Suez Model
Tehran has framed its proposal as a legitimate exercise of sovereignty under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Specifically, Iranian media have cited Article 79, which allows coastal states to establish conditions for cables entering their territorial sea.
Although Iran signed but never ratified UNCLOS, the convention is widely regarded by the international legal community as binding under customary international law. For Western governments, that raises the question of how far Iran can stretch its interpretation before it clashes with rules on freedom of navigation and the rights of other states to lay and maintain cables that are critical to their economies.
Iran has pointed to Egypt as a successful precedent. Cairo generates hundreds of millions of dollars annually by leveraging the Suez Canal’s strategic location to host cables linking Europe and Asia. However, legal experts note a fundamental difference: the Suez Canal is an artificial waterway carved through Egyptian territory, whereas the Strait of Hormuz is a natural strait governed by different international transit rules and longstanding concepts of “transit passage” for commercial shipping and communications.
Irini Papanicolopulu, a professor of international law at SOAS University of London, notes that while Iran must honor existing contracts for cables already laid, it maintains the right to set conditions for new infrastructure. Any unilateral move to threaten existing cable operations, she adds, would likely provoke challenges from affected states in international courts or arbitration bodies and test how enforceable such rulings are in a high-risk security environment.
The Logistics of Sabotage
The risk to these cables is compounded by the extreme difficulty of repairing them in a conflict zone. Submarine cable repair requires specialized vessels to remain stationary for extended periods, making them “sitting ducks” for asymmetric attacks by drones, fast boats, or anti-ship missiles.
The current operational environment is precarious. Of the five maintenance ships typically stationed in the region to handle faults, only one currently remains inside the Persian Gulf, according to industry officials. That shortage complicates contingency planning for governments and telecom regulators, who depend on rapid repair to keep financial markets, energy trading platforms, and cross-border payment systems functioning.
This vulnerability was demonstrated in 2024 in the Red Sea, where a vessel struck by Iran-aligned Houthi militants dragged its anchor across the seabed. The resulting damage severed three cables and disrupted nearly 25% of regional internet traffic, forcing carriers to reroute data through already congested paths and prompting emergency consultations between Gulf states and their allies.
The history of cable warfare is long, dating back to the 1850s. At the onset of World War I, Britain severed Germany’s key telegraph cables to isolate its communications. While modern networks can often reroute traffic, the world’s absolute dependence on real-time data flows means that a coordinated attack today would have consequences far exceeding those of the telegraph age and would almost certainly require a concerted response from national security councils, financial regulators, and central banks.
The Iranian government has not yet formally issued a deadline for payment or detailed the specific legal mechanism for fee collection, and U.S. sanctions currently prohibit American tech firms from making payments to the regime. For now, Tehran’s signaling leaves global technology companies and their home governments weighing whether the Strait of Hormuz is becoming not just an energy chokepoint, but a bargaining chip in the emerging geopolitics of the seabed.
