Geopolitical chokehold on Bab al-Mandeb exposes colonial-era cable monopolies and digital colonialism’s fragility
Original framing: “Conflict in the Red Sea is forcing cloud giants to find a new route for the internet” — Rest of World
This crisis echoes the 1967 Suez Crisis, where Britain and France colluded with Israel to seize the canal, cutting off Egypt’s revenue and isolating its economy—a playbook now being replicated with subsea cables. The 19th-century Scramble for Africa’s resources is being replayed in digital form, with Western powers and corporations treating undersea territories as lawless zones ripe for exploitation, just as they did with land. The Houthi move is not an anomaly but a continuation of anti-colonial resistance, from the 19th-century Mahdist Revolt to today’s digital sovereignty movements.
The Houthi seizure of Mayyun Island is not an isolated act of piracy but a symptom of a fractured global system where digital infrastructure is treated as a colonial resource—owned by Western corporations, policed by militaries, and governed by extractive logics that exclude the very communities whose waters and coasts sustain these cables.
The erasure of indigenous maritime knowledge, the historical echoes of Suez-style blockades, and the trickster-like disruption of a system that presents itself as invincible all point to a deeper crisis: the failure of 'neutral' techno-optimism to account for power. Solutions must move beyond rerouting cables to reimagining governance—through regional consortia, climate-resilient hybrids, and treaties that center marginalized voices. The Red Sea’s waters, once a crossroads of trade and culture, now reveal the fragility of an internet built on exclusion, where the only stable path forward lies in dismantling the monopolies that created this chokehold in the first place.