Insights

Geopolitical think tanks and maritime strategists routinely sound the alarm over the vulnerabilities of the global internet. The narrative is well‑rehearsed: “Between 15% and 17% of all global internet traffic passes through a narrow bottleneck in the Red Sea and Egypt, representing over 90% of direct communications between Europe and Asia.” Headlines scream that a single severed anchor in the Red Sea or an asymmetric naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz could plunge Eurasia into a digital dark age.

While this makes for compelling foreign policy reading, it represents a profound misunderstanding of network architecture. It conflates physical maritime geography with logical IP routing. The claim that 90% of Europe‑Asia data travels via the Red Sea is not just inaccurate — it is dangerously misleading.

In reality, although the Red Sea digital corridor forms an strategic route for Eurasia connectivity and internet traffic, a large portion, and often the outright majority, of Eurasia‘s actual data traffic transits the United States via the transatlantic‑transpacific “Global Loop.”

1. The BGP Reality: Pixels Aren’t Cargo Ships

The primary flaw in the “Red Sea dependency” theory is treating an IP packet like a container ship. A cargo vessel sailing from Shanghai to Rotterdam has limited choices; it must traverse the Suez Canal or spend weeks routing around the Cape of Good Hope.

Internet traffic operates under the laws of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and network economics. BGP does not select the shortest physical line on a map; it optimizes for throughput, capacity availability, commercial peering agreements, and packet delivery costs.

Because global Tier‑1 carriers and hyperscalers (Google, Meta, Microsoft, AWS) have spent the last two decades building immense, hyper‑redundant connectivity, a data packet traveling from Tokyo to London is far more likely to jump across the Pacific, transit the United States, and leap across the Atlantic than it is to squeeze through the Bab al‑Mandab Strait.

2. The Economic Calculus: Why Asia–Europe Traffic Routinely Crosses the US

The overestimation of direct Eurasian cable routes collapses under the weight of two fundamental economic realities: the global concentration of IP peering infrastructure in the United States and a pricing arbitrage driven by dominant carriers in Asia.

2.1 The U.S. Peering Hegemony & “The Global Loop”

Why do European and Asian telecommunications providers route data across the American landmass? The answer lies in the historic and ongoing concentration of global IP peering and transit infrastructure.

• Data Center Alley Access: Northern Virginia (Ashburn) remains the undisputed center of the internet ecosystem, handling up to 70% of global internet traffic interactions at its interconnected data center hubs. On the west coast, Los Angeles, Silicon Valley and Seattle are among the top destinations for Asian telcos and ISPs.
• The Interconnection Gravity: Major Asian telcos (such as NTT, Telin, China Telecom) and European giants (Orange, Deutsche Telekom, BT) do not primarily meet each other in Asia and Europe, less in Egypt or the Gulf; they meet at massive Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) and Points of Presence (PoPs) in Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, Chicago, New York, and Virginia.

Rather than purchasing expensive, protected transit across politically volatile terrestrial stretches in the Middle East, an Asian ISP can peer directly with a European network via U.S. switching fabrics, executing a seamless trans‑American handshake. This economic logic turns the United States into the default meeting ground for Eurasia’s data, regardless of where the physical cables lie.

2.2 The Intra‑Asia U.S. Traffic Arbitrage

Paradoxically, a staggering volume of data passing between neighboring Asian countries is routed through the United States first. This is driven entirely by a pricing mismatch engineered by major dominant telecommunications operators in Asia.

For example, Chinese state‑owned operators command monopoly control over access to mainland China’s massive user base. To exploit this, they charge exorbitant premium rates for IP Transit and Paid Peering ports at their regional Asian hubs, such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo. For an independent Asian ISP or telco, buying high‑quality, low‑latency direct access into China from an Asian Point of Presence (PoP) is financially prohibitive.

To circumvent these high regional tariffs, a massive optimization loop occurs:

• Various Asian ISPs and telcos route only a tiny fraction of their premium traffic via direct, local connections in Asian PoPs.
• They push the overwhelming majority of their China‑bound bulk traffic eastward across the Pacific to the United States.
• In the U.S. market, these Asian carriers buy wholesale IP Transit from American and international Tier‑1 providers at highly commoditized, hyper‑competitive U.S. market rates.
• These U.S. and international providers then peer directly with the Chinese operators at colocated PoPs.

Ultimately, the Chinese operators are forced to absorb the costs on the US backhaul and the trans-Pacific subsea cable capacity to bring that data across the ocean to China on their own dime. This economic arbitrage turns the United States into a massive, cost‑effective clearinghouse for data that is geographically local to Asia, rendering the Middle Eastern transit lanes commercially irrelevant for this traffic segment.

It is similar for internet traffic between Japan/Korea and other Asian destinations.

The combined effect of U.S. peering hegemony and the Asian arbitrage loop means that the vast majority of Eurasia’s data — whether between Asia and Europe or within Asia itself — never touches the Red Sea. Only a fractional traffic uses the direct submarine path through Egypt.

3. The 2026 Regulatory Fracture: The FCC‘s Interconnection Ban

While the US has historically acted as the ultimate neutral ground for global IP peering, a severe regulatory shift is dismantling this paradigm. In April 2026, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) advanced a sweeping Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) titled “Protecting Against National Security Threats in Domestic Telecommunications Service.”

This regulatory mandate moves far beyond historical retail telecom license revocations, implementing strict “logical and physical isolation” rules targeting any entity on the national security Covered List (including China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom). The NPRM enforces two devastating structural blocks:

1. Data Center & PoP Operations Ban: It bars these carriers from operating physical data centers or holding Points of Presence at internet exchange points within US borders.
2. The Interconnection Prohibition: It explicitly prohibits US telecommunications carriers — and any carrier operating within US jurisdiction — from interconnecting with these networks.

The impact on global wholesale telecoms is profound. By blocking interconnection, the FCC is effectively cutting the cord on the US‑based peering fabrics where Chinese carriers traditionally interface with their European, Asian, and American partners. This regulatory minefield introduces immense compliance risks and forces a fragmentation of the traditional Asia‑US‑Europe routing loop.

As a result, the very economic arbitrage that made the US the central hub for Eurasia traffic is under direct threat. Asian and European carriers may soon lose the ability to exchange traffic cheaply on US soil.

4. The Rise of the Asia‑Canada‑Europe (ACE) Digital Corridor

With the Red Sea plagued by geopolitical instability and the Asia‑US‑Europe route facing imminent regulatory balkanization due to the FCC mandate, global network architects are aggressively shifting their focus northward. The Asia‑Canada‑Europe (ACE) digital corridor has emerged as the viable replacement strategy.

The ACE corridor bypasses both the volatile Middle Eastern chokepoints and the fractured US regulatory regime by establishing a fully sovereign, G7‑protected data pipeline:

East Asia → (Transpacific cable, e.g., Topaz) → Canada West Coast (Vancouver/Prince Rupert) → (Sovereign terrestrial fiber across Canada) → Canada East Coast (Halifax) → (Transatlantic cable) → Europe (Ireland/UK)

• The Pacific Ingress: Data routes from East Asian hubs (Japan, South Korea) directly to Canada‘s West Coast via new subsea infrastructure like Google’s Topaz system.
• The Sovereign Terrestrial Bridge: Data transits completely underground across the Canadian landmass. Because it never crosses the US border, it eliminates the phenomenon of “boomerang routing” (data needlessly dipping into US nodes), completely insulated from FCC jurisdictional overreach and national security blockades.
• The Atlantic Egress: Data exits Canada‘s East Coast via ultra‑high‑capacity transatlantic systems (such as EXA Express) to land directly in Ireland, the UK, and continental Europe.

This corridor preserves the economic benefits of a North American transit hub while avoiding the legal minefield created by the FCC.

5. Don’t Overstate the Red Sea‘s Importance

None of the above is meant to dismiss the Red Sea and the Suez Canal entirely. They are not irrelevant. A handful of direct, low‑latency submarine cables (e.g., SEA‑ME‑WE 5, AAE‑1, IMEWE) do cross that corridor, and they carry valuable traffic for financial trading, interactive services, and latency‑sensitive applications. Damage to those cables does cause measurable disruption.

But the scale of that disruption has been routinely and dangerously exaggerated. The claim that 90% of Europe‑Asia traffic depends on the Red Sea is a myth. In reality, the bulk of bulk data (video streaming, cloud backups, email, content distribution) happily takes a longer but cheaper path via the US or possibly via Canada in the future. On the other hand, there are multiple terrestrial routes via Central Asia and Russia. During the 2024 Red Sea cable cuts, most users in Europe and Asia experienced no noticeable impact on everyday internet services, precisely because network operators automatically rerouted traffic through well-established resilient solutions, including those across the Atlantic‑Pacific loop.

Politicians and media pundits who warn that a single cut in the Red Sea would “shut down the internet” are ignoring decades of BGP engineering and the massive over‑capacity built into the global network.

6. A Broader View of Resilience

When we discuss network resilience, we must not confine ourselves to submarine cables alone.

The global digital fabric is woven from multiple, interdependent while interconnected layers: subsea systems, terrestrial fiber backbones, and hybrid sea‑land routes that together create a web of redundancy far more robust than any single chokepoint narrative suggests.

Overland cables across Eurasia — whether along the historic Silk Road corridors through Central Asia, the Trans‑Siberian route, or the emerging Middle Corridor crossing the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus — provide critical alternative pathways that bypass both maritime bottlenecks and geopolitical flashpoints in the Red Sea or the Gulf. And the great efforts on developing terrestrial cables linking Europe with the Gulf enhance the resilience. 

Likewise, the strategic combination of submarine and terrestrial segments (such as the ACE corridor and China‑Europe land bridges) ensures that data can be dynamically rerouted when one medium is compromised.

Resilience, therefore, is not the property of a single cable system or a single technology; it is an emergent characteristic of a diverse, multi‑modal network. Any realistic assessment of global internet robustness must account for the full portfolio of subsea, terrestrial, and hybrid infrastructure — not just the cables that happen to lie at the bottom of the world’s most contested waters.

Conclusion

The contention that Eurasia‘s digital health hinges entirely on the narrow waters of the Red Sea or the Strait of Hormuz is an architectural illusion. For decades, the global internet relied on the economic efficiencies of the United States to bridge East and West. However, as geopolitical friction translates into aggressive domestic regulatory policies like the FCC’s 2026 interconnection ban, the topology of the internet must adapt.

The future of resilient, high‑capacity Eurasia data flow will continue to travel through the Red Sea and Gulf corridor as well as across the United States, despite the vulnerable maritime chokepoints in the former and the increasingly bifurcated networks in the latter. Moreover, multiple viable alternatives are emerging, including the Asia‑Canada‑Europe (ACE) digital corridor and Eurasia’s terrestrial cable routes.

The Red Sea matters, but not nearly as much as the alarmists claim. The same is true of the Strait of Hormuz. The global internet is far more flexible, redundant, and economically driven than any maritime map suggests.