India, Aug. 22 -- 1Reporting on submarine cables must have meant negotiating a secretive world. What was the hardest door to open? The hardest doors to open remain the big tech companies: Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon, which have, of late, been laying or funding two of every three new cables. We know how reliant we are on these companies for software, social media, AI services and other aspects of the Internet, so it was a shock to me to find out how reliant we are on them for even the physical infrastructure of it. They refused to grant interviews with any of their cable engineers or executives, which made it difficult for me to ascertain why they got into the cable business. It isn't hard to guess, though. The lifeblood of their business is data, and given that the cost of a cable is, if not inconsequential then certainly hugely affordable to these cash-rich companies, it makes perfect sense that they want to control the cables through which this data flows as well. 2You visited remote Pacific islands, African coasts, areas near China. What stands out, about how different countries experience this global web? What is surprisingly universal is how reliant all these places have become on their cables. The degree of that reliance differs, of course. An island such as Taiwan, with 15 undersea cables landing on its shores and with an economy that is deeply integrated into global finance, will feel the shock of a total cable outage much, much more deeply than say Tonga, which has just one international cable running out to its capital. When Tonga experienced an outage of that cable, life ground to a halt, but since it is so remote from the hurly burly of the global economy, it was able to bear that shock a little easier. Which is to say: it wasn't as if stock exchange transactions worth billions of dollars a day, for instance, had to be suspended. But this is also a reminder that places like Tonga are under-connected, without backup options, for a reason: cables are increasingly laid by companies that have no real incentive to link up small, isolated communities. 3Given that a damage to a single cable can isolate a nation, have governments underestimated how dependent societies have become on this infrastructure? I think they've underestimated that dependence for a long time, but they're slowly starting to wake up to it. And they're trying to ward off that kind of ruinous damage. The UK, for instance, has two warships constantly patrolling its waters to protect its undersea infrastructure. The US has been cutting China out of cable projects, because it is suspicious of Chinese hardware companies. Companies within the industry will point out that malicious sabotage of cables still makes up only a tiny fraction of all cable cuts in a calendar year. But governments are beginning to think that that fraction will rise, or at least that even the occasional act of sabotage can cause real havoc....