There’s an internet choke point in the Middle East — is the solution in the North Pole?

The vast majority of the world’s data — emails, financial transactions, the internet — is carried by fiber optic cables that run along the ocean floor and converge at a few narrow choke points. Periodically, policymakers will release reports noting that this arrangement seems risky, but these routes are the shortest, often in use since the telegraph era, and the system has managed remarkably well. Cables break regularly, and traffic gets rerouted until a repair ship can come and fix the cut. But the war in Iran, coming after several years of disruptions from conflict in Yemen, is spurring governments and companies to consider alternate routes, including one going across the North Pole. The current problems began in 2024, when a Houthi missile struck a cargo ship in the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait off the coast of Yemen, causing the vessel to drift for days and drag its anchor across three of the more than a dozen submarine cables crammed into the narrow Red Sea passage. Cable repair is carried out by specialized ships that fish up the broken ends and splice them back together. It’s delicate work that involves slowly dragging grapnels along the seafloor and floating very still for hours while fiber strands are spliced together, none of which can be safely done in a war zone. Consequently, it took more than four months to broker the agreements necessary to bring in a ship . …