Foresight Briefing · 003

Executive summary

• In the weeks after the offensive phase of Operation Epic Fury, the most important Hormuz development has shifted from missiles to messages: IRGC‑linked media are floating a regime of fees, licences and legal control over undersea internet cables in the Strait.
  

• This points to a new kind of leverage: a state does not have to cut a cable to change the business environment – it can seek to regulate, monetise or politically condition access to the route itself.
  

• Europe and the UK, meanwhile, are treating subsea cables as strategic infrastructure, investing hundreds of millions of euros in resilience and publicly calling out Russian submarine activity over cables and pipelines.
  

• The weak signal is clear: undersea cables are moving from “background plumbing” to governed, contested assets, with implications for cloud‑reliant, manufacturing and financial firms on a 2–18 month horizon.

1. Hormuz after Epic Fury: the new message from Tehran

With U.S. officials saying the offensive phase of Epic Fury has concluded, attention has shifted from active strikes to what comes next in and around Hormuz. The military picture is still sensitive, but the more revealing development for business is digital: Iranian state‑linked and IRGC‑aligned outlets are now openly proposing that Tehran impose licensing fees, annual renewals and legal conditions on undersea internet cables crossing the Strait.

Tasnim and other IRGC‑linked media argue that foreign operators should pay per‑metre infrastructure and licensing fees to route cables through Iranian waters, that annual renewals should apply, and that major technology firms using those routes should effectively submit to Iranian regulations. Proposals also call for Iranian companies to have exclusive responsibility for cable maintenance and repair, turning access to vessels and repair rights into a direct lever of influence.

Even if these ideas never become formal law in their current form, they matter as signals. They show that Tehran is thinking about Hormuz not just as an energy and shipping chokepoint, but as a digital corridor that can be used for revenue, coercion or bargaining power. This follows earlier reporting that Iran and its media ecosystem had already warned submarine cables in the Strait were a vulnerable point for the region’s digital economy.

Confidence assessment: High confidence that Iranian elites are actively exploring a “cable sovereignty” model in Hormuz; medium confidence on how far and how fast this will move into binding law or operational practice over the next 12–18 months.

Board implications this quarter

• Treat these proposals as advance notice that access, repair and governance around key digital routes can become bargaining chips, not just technical issues.

• Ask management whether current risk assessments assume cable exposure is mainly about physical damage and repair time, or whether political and legal control are being considered.

• Ensure that investor and lender communications acknowledge that the evolution of rules around infrastructure is itself a material risk factor.

2. From physical vulnerability to political and commercial control

Industry data has long shown that most cable faults come from anchors, fishing gear and accidental human activity, not deliberate attacks. The traditional concern has therefore been resilience: how quickly can traffic be rerouted and a cable repaired after a break?

The Hormuz proposals highlight a different dimension. A cable does not need to be cut to become a business problem. A corridor can become riskier if operators face new licensing demands, uncertain repair rights, legal claims over data transit, or the possibility that a government may use maintenance permissions as leverage in a wider dispute.

Euronews and others report that IRGC‑linked media are explicitly calling for Tehran to impose “protection fees” and transit charges on international cable operators, to monitor global data traffic crossing Hormuz, and to treat the waterway as a source of billions of dollars in potential revenue and pressure on Western tech firms. Iranian commentary has suggested that companies such as Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon should be required to operate under Iranian regulations for activity linked to cables in the Strait.

This marks a transition from treating subsea infrastructure as neutral background plumbing to treating it as a governed, politicised pressure point. For senior leaders, the operational threat is not only outage. It is the emergence of a world in which connectivity routes are exposed to the same logic that already shapes shipping lanes, energy corridors and export controls.

Confidence assessment: High confidence that legal, regulatory and commercial control over cables is becoming as important as physical exposure in certain corridors; medium confidence on the specific mechanisms individual states will adopt.

Board implications this quarter

• Ask for a clear view of where licensing, jurisdiction and repair rights sit along the physical routes underpinning critical services.

• Challenge any assumptions that “as long as the cable is intact, we are fine” in operational‑resilience scenarios.

• Consider how contractual, legal and governance arrangements would need to change if a key corridor became regulated or politicised rather than physically degraded.

3. Why this logic could spread beyond the Gulf

Hormuz is an immediate pressure point, but the logic is not confined to the Gulf. Strategic waterways and cable‑dense regions exist elsewhere where geopolitical rivalry, legal uncertainty and infrastructure concentration already overlap.

In Europe, the response has been defensive and state‑led. The European Commission’s February 2026 package allocates around €347 million to strategic submarine cable projects under the Connecting Europe Facility Digital programme and launches a “Cable Security Toolbox” to strengthen security and resilience. EU documents stress that submarine cable protection is now a strategic security priority, with governance, monitoring, repair readiness and smart‑cable capabilities treated as part of a system‑of‑systems approach to resilience.

This is a different stance from Iran’s, but it reflects the same underlying recognition: subsea systems now sit firmly inside security and sovereignty thinking. In Asia, analysis has highlighted China’s interest in deep‑sea capabilities relevant to cable cutting, repair and seabed control, raising the prospect that undersea infrastructure could become part of grey‑zone coercion in future crises, particularly in the South China Sea and Indo‑Pacific chokepoints.

For the UK and North Atlantic region, the signal has been even more direct. The UK Defence Secretary recently revealed that three Russian submarines – including specialist deep‑sea intelligence platforms – conducted a covert operation over cables and pipelines north of the UK, tracked for more than a month before being forced to withdraw. Officials stressed there was no evidence of damage, but emphasised that threats to underwater infrastructure are increasing and that such capabilities are designed for hybrid operations against cables and pipelines.

Confidence assessment: High confidence that undersea infrastructure is becoming a common arena for strategic competition; medium confidence that other states will copy Iran’s fee/licensing model, but high confidence that different forms of leverage and control will be tested in other corridors.

Board implications this quarter

• Treat subsea infrastructure as a global, not regional, risk issue: the Gulf, North Atlantic, Mediterranean and Indo‑Pacific each present different combinations of exposure and governance.

• Ask which parts of the business depend on cable‑dense regions that already sit inside contested maritime zones.

• Monitor EU, UK and Indo‑Pacific policy developments as early indicators of regulatory expectations and resilience norms for operators and large users.

4. Why this matters for different sectors

The sector‑specific implications of “cable sovereignty” are different, but the core risk is shared: strategic dependence on routes that may become legally and politically conditional, not only technically vulnerable.

• Digital, cloud and data‑intensive businesses The immediate issue is concentration risk. Many organisations understand their dependence on certain cloud providers, but far fewer can map which physical corridors those services rely on or what happens if a corridor becomes subject to new fees, licences or regulatory control. Hormuz matters because it shows how pressure can enter at the infrastructure layer even if front‑end services appear unaffected in the short term.

• Manufacturing and supply‑chain‑intensive businesses This is a dual‑corridor problem. The same regions that shape shipping, energy and commodity flows also host the digital systems that coordinate logistics, suppliers and trade finance. A chokepoint like Hormuz can therefore affect not only cargo and fuel, but also the visibility, routing and commercial systems used to manage them.

• Financial and professional services The question is not only continuity of trading and payments. It is also whether legal, supervisory and client expectations can be met when critical activity is routed through increasingly contested infrastructure. Low‑latency connectivity, transaction integrity and cross‑border client service all become more complex when the status of underlying routes is changing.
  

Confidence assessment: High confidence that these sectors face material strategic questions from cable‑related chokepoint risk over a 2–18 month horizon, though specific exposure levels will vary by footprint and architecture.

Board implications this quarter

• Require a simple map that links major products and services to the underlying corridors, cables and landing points they depend on.

• Ask whether current operational‑resilience and third‑party‑risk frameworks treat subsea infrastructure as a strategic factor or a technical detail.

• Start integrating cable‑related scenarios into sector‑specific stress tests (for example, latency spikes and route changes for trading; degraded logistics data for manufacturing).

5. Where the HORIZON Futures Engine adds value

This is the kind of issue that a futures‑led, cross‑domain radar is designed to catch at the “ideas and incentives” stage, not only at the “incident and outage” stage. The challenge is less about reacting to a sudden cable cut and more about recognising when the rules and incentives around infrastructure are beginning to change.

The HORIZON Futures Engine does this by:

• Tracking state‑linked rhetoric and policy proposals alongside physical incidents and market behaviour in chokepoints like Hormuz.

• Linking those signals to changes in regional and multilateral policy (for example, the EU’s Cable Security Toolbox and funding, or UK/NATO responses to Russian submarine activity).

• Mapping emerging “cable sovereignty” or control concepts onto specific business dependencies by sector and geography.

6. Signals to watch over the next 12–18 months

• Whether Iranian “cable sovereignty” proposals move from media and political commentary into formal legislation, licensing demands or operational constraints on operators in Hormuz.

• Whether other strategic maritime zones begin to show similar rhetoric around permits, repair rights, transit control or economic rents tied to cables.

• How European and UK policy on cable resilience evolves, particularly where regulators start framing subsea dependencies as part of operational resilience, critical third‑party risk or digital‑sovereignty regimes.

• Whether providers quietly change route architectures, resilience investments or customer disclosures in response to the political status of chokepoints, rather than purely technical risk.

7. Questions for your next executive or risk committee meeting

• Do we know which subsea corridors our most critical cloud, data, payments or logistics systems actually use in practice – beyond the brand names of our vendors?

• If a major corridor became legally or politically conditional rather than physically unavailable, what would that mean for our operating model, contracts and resilience assumptions?

• Have we tested a scenario in which a state uses fees, licensing or repair control as leverage over cables without causing a visible outage?

• What would regulators, clients or investors reasonably expect us to be able to show if a cable‑linked chokepoint began to degrade latency, continuity or compliance across parts of our business?
  

Hormuz may be the immediate case, but the larger question is broader: whether undersea cables remain passive infrastructure, or whether they are becoming the next category of strategic chokepoint through which states can shape commerce, data flows and influence without firing a shot.