How to Recover Digital Sovereignty: Ten Measured Steps for Governments and Regulators
- Andres Fígoli
- Sep 21
- 14 min read
How to Recover Digital Sovereignty: Ten Measured Steps for Governments and Regulators
In today’s increasingly fragmented digital landscape, governments are under pressure to reclaim control over critical infrastructure — particularly submarine cables — without triggering capital flight or regulatory retaliation. Restoring digital sovereignty is neither a rhetorical banner nor a declaration of independence from global technology giants. It must be a carefully designed roadmap rooted in facts, legal authority and market logic.
Over-the-top (OTT) platforms are not traditional telecommunications operators. Their scale, business models and leverage mechanisms differ fundamentally — granting them a dominant, and at times suffocating, market share in the submarine cable industry. Addressing this imbalance demands pragmatism, not posturing. While many countries aspire to become regional or international hubs for submarine cable infrastructure, few move beyond declarations. Even fewer take concrete steps to ensure their citizens enjoy stable, secure, and affordable connectivity — which should remain the core objective.
The ten steps that follow offer a practical, evidence-based roadmap for policymakers to gradually recover digital sovereignty. Each measure is intended to be legally sound, economically viable and tailored to address both the structural asymmetries of the current market and the urgent need for resilient, inclusive connectivity.
Build the Data: Statistics as the foundation stone
Before any meaningful reform can take place, governments must first build their own independent statistical foundation. While hundreds of reports, media articles and white papers — often authored by well-known consultants or interest-driven think tanks — circulate with strong opinions and policy suggestions, very few governments possess an internal, comprehensive database detailing the status of submarine cables within their jurisdiction.
Mapping the cables is only the beginning; understanding their operational reality is the real challenge. This internal tool should include, at a minimum, the following data from the last 20 years:
all submarine cable outages, including shunt faults, within jurisdictional water or beyond when it affects a segment connecting to their country
causes and duration of each event
mobilization time and costs of repair vessels
the extent of traffic degradation or loss
delays caused by permits, customs, or other external constraints
a breakdown of which users (e.g. retail) or services were affected
Without such data, policymakers risk blindly adopting international "best practices" that may be irrelevant or even counterproductive in their specific context. For example, if a country has not experienced a single cable cut caused by fishing activity in over 20 years, why impose new fishing restrictions that create unnecessary friction with local communities? Evidence must come before action.
Similarly, decisions such as whether to support the development of a regional cable maintenance fleet, or to reform national cabotage rules, should be grounded in verifiable data: how many past repairs were delayed due to geographic distance from the cable maintenance ships’ base ports, lack of such vessels, or bureaucratic hurdles? Without this clarity, well-intentioned measures risk becoming costly bureaucratic exercises with little impact.
This is the ABC of digital sovereignty: understanding what a nation depends on — and how and where it has failed over time when submarine cables were most needed. Only with hard data can policymakers withstand pressure from corporate or public actors and implement measures that balance connectivity goals with national interests. Evidence-based policymaking is not optional — it is the only effective defence against corporate and geopolitical pressure in an already distorted submarine cable market.
Moreover, this tool must not depend on the goodwill of private actors or third-party consultants. Regulators should manage and update it regularly and control its accuracy to avoid a cable owner evading its accountability.
In a world where “data” can be curated, and “truth” outsourced, the line between analysis and influence grows dangerously thin. Scepticism is not cynicism — it’s the foundation of responsible governance. Some of the most damaging policy ideas are not outright falsehoods, but half-truths cloaked in technical jargon and academic formatting.
Take, for instance, a region where most cable outages have been consistently attributed to merchant ships dragging anchors — all of them clearly identifiable through activated AIS systems. In such a case, why would the deployment of expensive, unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) be necessary for additional surveillance? Does the solution respond to actual evidence, or to the interests of those selling the technology?
This is why digital regulators must not outsource their judgment. They must build their own knowledge base, maintain it with integrity, and be willing to question even the most qualified voices — especially when the stakes involve national infrastructure, sovereignty, and public trust.
Above all, this is the most important input for the next steps, which involve the creation of national regulations. In most countries worldwide, there is no such specific legal framework for subsea cables, so the question of changing the status quo will be based on these statistics and, subsequently, measured in the same way, so that any adjustment is based on them as well.
Require optimization of cable repair vessel mobilization time
Every cable landing permit should include an enforceable contractual clause mandating minimum mobilization times for cable repair vessels. Otherwise, cables may remain inoperative for months—not due to technical constraints but because of cable owners’ funding constraints or opportunistic pricing by maintenance providers.
Governments must not accept repair operations contingent solely on a cable owner’s financial capacity or willingness to act during traffic degradation. Failure to address this could critically diminish rerouting capabilities during regional multi-cable outages, leaving countries vulnerable to nationwide internet blackouts.
This raises a related question directly linked to geopolitics: should "non-authorized" (primarily Chinese) repair providers be permitted to enter the market to boost competition and reduce transit delays from port to fault zones? Current exclusionary practices distort the submarine cable maintenance market, stifling incentives to modernize an aging vessel fleet that is largely over 20 years old.
Governments should recognize the challenges faced by national telecom carriers in securing competitive pricing and viable conditions for repair services amid scarce, outdated maintenance vessels. Are these carriers confronting a cartel that undermines compliance with local requirements of digital sovereignty? If so, antitrust regulators must intervene immediately to scrutinize this niche market and its adverse conditions for local players that cannot match OTTs’ overwhelming, economies-of-scale demands.
Diversify the Supply Chain Without Political Paralysis
Geopolitical debates over "non-authorized" suppliers dominate global regulatory agendas. Yet digital sovereignty requires not the exclusion of any single country’s suppliers but the avoidance of over-reliance on any one source.
Instead of binary exclusion policies, governments should adopt pragmatic safeguards:
Mandate full supply chain transparency
Enforce strict liability for technical or cybersecurity failures
Ensure contractual clarity with robust auditing rights
Publicly demand verifiable evidence of security breaches from accusers (e.g. Mexico’s President’s 2022 request regarding mobile networks).
Historically, security breaches often stemmed not from individual vendors but opaque subcontracting chains that diffuse accountability. True digital sovereignty hinges on a diversified, transparent, and auditable supply chain—governed by enforceable rules, not geopolitical alignment.
Even when a single nation controls a submarine cable’s entire supply chain, from manufacturing to maintenance of every cable installed in its jurisdictional waters, this monopolistic structure does not ensure efficiency, competitiveness, or innovation. A stark disparity emerges when traditional carriers receive no priority for their project quotations from the cable manufacturers, while hyperscaler-backed megaprojects have fast-track deployment through scale & volume and no financial constraints.
Permits, Not Privileges: Building Trust Through Fair and Open Processes
Many OTTs argue that, in order to attract data centres, countries must streamline and liberalize their submarine cable permitting processes. While procedural efficiency is important, governments must be cautious not to grant disproportionate advantages that may distort competition and contribute to the formation of de facto monopolies. Poorly calibrated concessions risk giving hyperscalers even greater leverage — often at the expense of smaller competitors (e.g. incumbent telecom operators), unable to match their scale.
Equity must be the guiding principle. All market participants — whether global giants or local companies — must be subject to the same rules, oversight, and obligations. Preferential treatment, usually granted under Memorandums of Understanding that bypass public scrutiny, not only distorts the market but also creates long-term regulatory vulnerabilities. Promises of massive investment in data centres or landing sites are often oversold. These projects may generate headlines but they rarely result in the scale of job creation or economic benefit that justifies exemptions to Environmental Assessment Studies when granting cable landing permits.
Thus, permitting procedures must be transparent, accessible, and protected from informal or opaque arrangements. Secret agreements negotiated without public oversight frequently become tools of leverage against future administrations, especially when those who signed them later join the companies that benefited. To avoid these conflicts of interest, non-solicitation clauses and post-employment cooling-off periods should be legally mandated, barring former public officials from joining regulated entities for a specified period if they were directly involved in granting cable permits.
Moreover, all seabed surveys and environmental data collected during the permitting process should be mandatorily shared with the coastal state that grants such landing permits. These surveys are conducted in public waters, not private territory. The information gathered must be considered a public good — valuable for future exploration, conservation, and maritime planning efforts beyond the cable project itself.
Measure traffic quality degradation
Governments should implement proactive and routine monitoring of traffic quality, especially during submarine cable outages, instead of relying solely on consumer complaints — which may never be formally submitted. The reality is that multiple contractual layers separate the end-user from the submarine cable owners, with most of them including liability waivers or limitations. As a result, in the event of a serious cable outage — even one caused by force majeure events such as seabed landslides — the compensation and remedies offered by an lnternet Service Provider to end-users are usually negligible compared to the actual harm suffered.
Frequently, submarine cable owners issue press statements claiming that traffic has been “restored” after an outage. However, these declarations often mask poor recovery plans and significant quality degradation, with restoration capacity services insufficient to fully comply with the same service quality. In practice, traffic prioritization may be applied — with essential government or corporate services receiving stable bandwidth, while the general public is left unable to make basic voice calls or stream international events like live football matches.
Such performance gaps are not trivial — they represent failures in digital rights and infrastructure resilience. To prevent this, governments must measure and publicly report traffic quality metrics during and after cable disruptions. This oversight is essential to verify whether cable owners and operators are truly fulfilling their commitments as stipulated in landing permits and other licences.
Regulators should actively enforce corrective measures — ranging from financial penalties to, in repeated cases of non-compliance, the revocation of permits. Monitoring must include independent metrics on key operational parameters, such as optical loss, latency, bit error rate and packet loss — not just lit capacity. These metrics should be actively collected over time to verify that all these measures are correctly applied or adjusted accordingly if necessary.
Unfortunately, many governments choose to remain silent during submarine cable outages, hoping the disruption will go unnoticed and political fallout will be avoided if neighbouring countries are similarly affected. This inaction often serves to obscure shortcomings in national digital strategies and to evade public scrutiny by ensuring the country is excluded from rankings of the most affected nations during regional multi-cable failures.
But digital sovereignty requires accountability both from the public and the private sectors. If subsea connectivity is recognized as a critical enabler of national development, then traffic quality monitoring must become a standard regulatory practice — not an afterthought triggered only during crisis.
Require a Minimum Share of National Traffic
Regulators often fall into two common traps when evaluating their country's submarine cable connectivity. The first is assuming that a dense cable landing map equates to sufficient and resilient capacity for national traffic. This is not necessarily true. Many of the cables landing on their shores may have been installed two decades ago — in 2002 or earlier — often with only four fibre pairs and ageing transmission equipment. These systems may be nearing the end of their useful life and are ill-equipped to handle growing data demands or provide adequate redundancy during a multi-cable outage.
An illustrative example was discussed in May 2025 during a session of the UK’s Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy 1: nearly 75% of the UK’s transatlantic potential capacity is currently concentrated in just two cables, both landing at Bude. Even though this news was repeated without the proper clarifications from its authors (e.g. use of alternative routes), it highlights a crucial point: evaluating resilience requires more than just counting cable landings — it requires assessing the actual design capacity and lit capacity of each system.
The second mistake is assuming that even brand-new, high-capacity cables — equipped with 16 fibre pairs — are necessarily carrying domestic traffic. In many cases, these systems are dominated by over-the-top (OTT) providers, which use them primarily to deliver their own content. A national telecom company may be a minority co-owner of the cable consortium, while the OTT holds a disproportionate share of the usable capacity. In some cases, the OTT may not even appear as a majority owner but holds the bulk of the capacity Indefeasible Rights of Use (IRUs) through confidential agreements with other consortium members.
To address this imbalance, governments should require cable landing permit holders to guarantee that a percentage of the system’s total design capacity is allocated to national traffic. It does not matter who owns the international portion of a subsea system or who holds the IRUs — the landing party, as the entity legally accountable to the coastal state, should ensure compliance with this quota.
Attempting to exert state control over the internal legal arrangements of a cable consortium or trace every capacity IRU/lease transaction or fibre pair sale is unrealistic and resource intensive. A better approach is to place the regulatory burden on the local landing party — requiring them to demonstrate that a fair share of capacity is available for national use, whether through non-transferable ownership or capacity IRU/leasing.
Chokepoints: Anticipating Risks Beyond Borders
The geographical location of submarine cable choke points is widely known within the industry. If a regulator is aware that a subsea system landing on its shores will traverse one of these high-risk zones — even if located in distant jurisdictions — it may not have the authority to demand a route change. However, it should at least require concrete assurances: restoration service commitments, regular stress tests, defined cable repair mobilization timelines, and mandatory reporting of any failures in those areas. These measures are essential to avoid unexpected disruptions and to ensure national preparedness.
Proactive regulatory oversight ensures that cable owners do not shift disproportionate risks onto coastal states without offering appropriate mitigation measures or transparency.
The phrase 'it is beyond our borders' became a common refrain among telecom regulators in distant countries during the February 2024 Red Sea multi-cable outage — a deflection that exposed the fragility of global interdependence. Too often, after a cable failure in one of these bottlenecks, governments are left with little more than force majeure explanations and vague technical justifications. But in reality, many of these outages could have been foreseen and mitigated if regulators had asked the right questions — not just within their borders but along the full routing of the system.
National sovereignty must not serve as a shield for operational negligence, especially when the consequences of inaction can spill over into regional or even global connectivity disruptions. A clear lesson emerged: several countries are now reassessing whether to approve landing permits for future systems that pass through recognized chokepoints — including the Red Sea and the Pacific side of the Panama Canal — due to the elevated risk such routes represent.
Therefore, when faced with stricter regulatory scrutiny or risk mitigation requirements based on statistics, a cable owner may find it more economical — or at least more reputationally sustainable — to reroute the cable and avoid problematic chokepoints altogether. This is precisely the objective: good regulation incentivizes better planning and protects against future cascading failures.
Failing to address chokepoint vulnerabilities before crisis strikes is not just regulatory oversight — it is regulatory negligence. A well-informed, regionally coordinated approach is necessary to hold cable operators accountable and to ensure infrastructure resilience in the face of concentrated risk.
Regulatory charges: Aligning Fees with Capacity and National Interest
How should countries charge those who benefit most from submarine cable operations — particularly in terms of national economic impact? Should a 2002 cable with 6 fibre pairs pay the same fees as a 2025 system with 24 fibre pairs and exponentially greater throughput? Clearly not. The seabed is a finite and strategic resource. When granting landing permits or operating licences, regulators must consider not just technical specifications but also how much national traffic the system actually carries, as opposed to simply transporting platform or content provider data.
The underlying objective should be to foster a competitive and diversified market. A nation strengthens its digital sovereignty not through over-reliance on a few major actors — often foreign — but by ensuring the conditions for genuine market pluralism. Regulatory charges, if calibrated properly, can become an instrument for balancing the market and preventing the formation of natural monopolies.
Of course, countries that have never implemented such charges may hesitate. A frequent concern is whether new regulatory fees will make their nations less attractive compared to neighbouring countries competing for the same high-value cable landings. That is a valid risk — but it can be mitigated. If the regulatory framework offers transparency, efficiency, and predictability, and if the country also commits to enforceable permit timelines and seabed protection zones where statistically justified (e.g. in high-risk fishing areas), then it becomes a compelling value proposition for responsible cable owners.
Regular Stress Tests Based on Real Risk Data
Submarine cable systems should be subject to regular stress tests but these must be grounded in real historical data — not speculative scenarios detached from the country’s actual risk profile. Conducting exercises based on sabotage when no such incidents have ever occurred in national waters is not only inefficient — it risks fuelling an arms-race mentality encouraged by external consultants eager to sell high-priced “security solutions” with little operational relevance.
Stress testing is useful when it simulates credible threats: recurring fishing gear entanglements, cable faults caused by abrasion, or delays due to outdated repair vessels. When based on these verifiable risks, stress tests can reveal bottlenecks in coordination, capacity shortfalls, or jurisdictional overlaps between government entities. This, in turn, helps authorities develop targeted contingency plans and allocate resources more effectively.
The goal is not to dramatize threats but to build resilience where it is actually needed. Sovereignty is not strengthened by paranoia but by preparedness rooted in evidence. Blindly copying scenarios promoted by foreign defence or consulting agendas — especially when those actors bear no responsibility for local realities — does more harm than good.
Governments should take ownership of their own risk landscape and build testing protocols accordingly. Only then will submarine cable security become an effective component of national resilience — and not a theatre for others’ geopolitical ambitions.
Decommissioning: Strategic Oversight Before Retirement
Decommissioning a submarine cable should never be automatic, free of charge, or left entirely to the discretion of the cable owners. Doing so may leave a country vulnerable, with insufficient alternative routes in the event of multi-cable outages. Coastal states must retain the authority to assess whether decommissioning aligns with national and regional connectivity needs.
In practice, decisions to retire cables within consortiums are not always based on infrastructure age or excessive maintenance costs. Sometimes, they are influenced by the strategic interests of dominant stakeholders who seek to avoid competition with their own newer, neighbouring subsea systems. In such cases, decommissioning may be driven by commercial speculation rather than technical obsolescence.
Before authorizing decommissioning, landing countries should first assess the strategic importance of the cable — including its role in redundancy, national traffic and route diversity. Only after this analysis should they initiate environmental impact assessment procedures or approve physical removal.
Final remarks
The ten measures outlined above are not exhaustive — they are a starting point. Many others can and should be explored depending on each country's specific context. But they all share a common objective: to defend the connectivity rights of all citizens, from large-scale users to ordinary individuals. This is the true purpose behind any discussion of submarine cable governance or digital infrastructure planning.
The first step is always the same: build your own data. Understand what has happened over the past two decades, map out current market shares in subsea connectivity and identify who controls deployment and repair operations. If dominant positions have emerged — particularly from hyperscalers— then regulators must scrutinize whether such dominance results in unfair practices that distort competition or limit national autonomy.
This is not about reinventing the wheel. Other sectors, like aviation, have already confronted similar challenges. No country would tolerate a single airline monopolizing its international routes or outsourcing critical decisions on connectivity to foreign actors. The same logic must apply to subsea telecommunications infrastructure — it requires fair competition between telecom carriers and OTTs, as well as a diverse and healthy ecosystem of cable manufacturers, installers and maintenance providers.
Connectivity must be resilient, competitive and strategically balanced. To achieve this, the telecommunications regulatory entity and the national antitrust watchdog must act in close coordination, ensuring that no dominant player — domestic or foreign — distorts the market to the detriment of long-term resilience or user access.
Digital sovereignty in the subsea connectivity arena does not imply isolationism or hostility to innovation. Rather, it demands evidence-based policymaking, fair competition, transparency, and accountability — especially toward end-users. Most citizens do not see or understand this invisible wholesale market that operates several layers beyond them, yet it shapes the quality, resilience and affordability of the services they rely on daily. It remains essential that governments retain the authority to decide for themselves how their subsea digital infrastructure is built, maintained and governed. Because if they do not, others will decide for them.
1. Steventon-Barnes, Jeremy. ‘’Written evidence submitted to the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy, UK’’, 6 March 2025. Available at: https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/138729/pdf/
Andrés Fígoli is the author of the two-volume book “Legal and Regulatory Aspects of Telecommunication Submarine Cables” and is the director of Fígoli Consulting, where he provides legal and regulatory advice on all aspects of subsea cable work. Mr. Fígoli graduated in 2002 from the Law School of the University of the Republic (Uruguay), holds a Master of Laws (LLM) from Northwestern University, and has worked on submarine cable cases for more than 20 years in a major wholesale telecommunication company. He also served as Director and Member of the Executive Committee of the International Cable Protection Committee (2015-2023).
This article was first published in Submarine Telecoms Forum Magazine #144 – September 2025.