● An undersea cable will emerge later this year near a popular sunbathing spot in the French port of Marseille. The cable, known as Peace, will travel over land from China to Pakistan, where it heads underwater and snakes along for about 7,500 miles of ocean floor via the Horn of Africa before terminating in France.⠀
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● The Peace cable, which is being built by Chinese companies, will be able to transport enough data in one second for 90,000 hours of Netflix, and will largely serve to make service faster for Chinese companies doing business in Europe and Africa. “This is a plan to project power beyond China toward Europe and Africa,” says Jean-Luc Vuillemin, the head of international networks at Orange SA, the French phone company that will operate the cable’s landing station in Marseille.⠀
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● The project also represents a new flashpoint in the geopolitics of the internet. Huawei Technologies Co., the company at the center of a long-simmering struggle between China and the U.S., is the third-largest shareholder in Hengtong Optic-Electric Co.—the company building the cable. Huawei is also making the equipment for the Peace cable landing stations and its underwater transmission gear. ⠀
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● Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook Inc. say they won’t be using Peace because they have enough capacity already. Even if they wanted to, using Peace would be hard for these companies to do, because of the U.S.-led boycott of many Chinese telecommunications equipment makers, including Huawei, for national security reasons. ⠀
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● Undersea cables have significant strategic importance. Right now, some 400 of them carry about 98% of international internet data and telephone traffic around the world. Many of them are owned and operated by U.S. companies—helping reinforce U.S. dominance over the internet while giving a sense of security to the U.S. and its allies that may be concerned about sabotage or surveillance.