Earlier this week the European Policy Centre (with its partner the Vodafone Institute) published a new discussion paper looking at the strategic issues around European submarine cables and making some recommendations. Since it’s an area of work close to my heart I have reviewed and set out below – in no particular order – some thoughts in response:

• The report recommends a state-backed insurance model and says that insurance for cables is “becoming harder to obtain”. It does not give any details at all as to why it thinks this would be a good idea. In my experience cables are not usually insured at all after they have been put into service – instead owners enter into a maintenance arrangement of some kind to fix them when they get cut or suffer faults. It’s hard in fact to imagine how insurance would help or what risk it would even cover. So I am not persuaded by this specific proposal.
  
• The report talks about the threats from malicious actors and cites “multiple cuts in the Baltic and Red Seas” saying “the number of deliberate attacks has grown”. I am sceptical of this claim – for which the report does not provide evidence -insofar as it relates to telecoms infrastructure  (though for energy sector infrastructure it’s perhaps a different story). Cable cuts are not unusual all over the world and it seems to me most likely that all of the cuts referenced have innocent causes. In fact, with my colleague Avi Marcus, we just published a blog piece about the court case following the well-publicised cuts off Finland – where after a six month investigation the court concluded that the anchor dragging by the Eagle S vessel (which cut multiple cables) was caused by a technical fault and was not deliberate. In the Red Sea of course marine disruption is well documented but even there I think the evidence is that cuts were more likely a consequence of attacks on marine vessels (causing the vessels to sink on top of at least one of the cables) rather than being deliberately targeted. After all cutting individual telecoms cables is very much less economically (and environmentally) damaging in most cases than cutting other types of subsea infrastructure so it’s hard to think what would motivate a deliberate attack.
  
• Page 7 of the report discusses “Unreliable actors” and the “growing recognition of the need to reduce dependence on vendors from unreliable third countries”. The relevance of this concern has increased  markedly in my experience over the past few years – Chinese vendors are much less likely to be considered for any new cable with a European involvement even if there is no US involvement. For example the North African and European cable Medusa (on which our DLA Piper colleagues in Spain have been advising) uses Nokia and Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) equipment. It’s also notable that the report mentions that the US itself cannot be seen as reliable as it once was by European allies.
  
• Even if you use only “reliable” equipment vendors though it seems to me (after discussion a while ago in a different context with industry veterans including Mike Constable) that there’s still a risk at the point where cables are fixed when they need repairs – the companies doing the repairs would have the opportunity to insert malicious equipment that the owners themselves might not notice. I think this needs closer attention. The report doesn’t mention maintenance in this context, only “ownership, construction and component supply” – so perhaps should be expanded to cover this specifically.
  
• The report does reference, in respect of maintenance, the idea of creating a “multi-purpose EU Cable Vessels Reserve Fleet”. I know from talking to the industry (and from our own experience advising on the new Black Sea Kardesa cable ) that the lack of suitable marine vessels is a big, and growing, problem – so I think this might be a very sensible idea (though it didn’t make the report’s top 10 recommendations).
  

All that said it’s great to see this infrastructure getting more attention in the wider world than it has for most of my 25+ year career focusing on the sector and (aside from the one about insurance) I am supportive of all the other recommendations!