Does the Internet Route Around Damage? – Baltic Sea Cable Cuts

My route from Poland to dedi box leased from Hetzner in Finland currently goes through AS1299 / twelve99.net (Warsaw->Talinn->Helsinki) peering, and there's a slight increase in latency since the cable cut. On a normal day, it's Poland -> Hetzner in Germany -> Hetzner in Finland. I'm guessing that the situation hurts companies like Hetzner financially.

> I'm guessing that the situation hurts companies like Hetzner financially.

So maybe, in the end, is a Hetzner competitor who profits from those "cable cuts". /s Just follow the money.

I think you have to follow the really big money.

What if these cuts were meant to route traffic through a specific network to intecept data?

I assume they need to pony up to get the cable repaired (unless there's insurance against such thing) but I'm not sure if I see the cable connection itself being a huge financial hit. Submarine cables getting damaged is fairly normal, and from what I've read, it should be back up by the end of the month.

I don't think a slight increase in latency can hurt them financially in any way. From my own measurements between Hetzner's datacenters, the latency increased from 25 ms to 40 ms.

Mildly amusing to say this had a direct, measurable impact on me? Absolutely. Something to lose sleep over? Maybe in some extremely niche situations.

I'd assume the financial impact is from increased costs for traffic. For Hetzner's customers traffic is somewhere between free and $1/TB, compared to AWS's $90/TB. Hence Hetzner hosts a lot of high traffic websites, and their margins on traffic have to be pretty slim. And with the cheap low-latency connection between the DCs some customers are bound to run a lot of traffic between servers in different Hetzner DCs.

Now I don't know what their peering agreements look like, but it seems like they normally route everything through Frankfurt's internet exchange and now have to take some different routes.

I mean, it will definitely cost someone money to go fix the cables. I know that in the US, our insurance explicitly does not cover acts of war (1) so I would be curious as to how insurance covers this.

I suspect that the costs of moving extra bits through other cables is not large. I would assume that Hetzner (and the other companies that own parts of these cables) have peering agreements with other companies and that most of them will not try and take advantage of the cut cables to renegotiate their peering agreements (2). So whatever rates they paid before will still be paid.

1: Because a war creates a problem for the risk pool, it is one of the things that actually can destroy huge amounts of property simultaneously, so it is a risk explicitly separated out and basically impossible to insure against, at least in the US commercial market.

2: Too risky to start renegotiating when your cable can be cut just as easily the next time.

I like your thought pattern.

Is there any actual evidence that this is an act of war? Comments on Hacker News and reddit are not evidence. Act of war by a civilian Chinese tanker (not Chinese military vessel) against whom?

Recent events suggest dismissing sabotage as a likely cause would be foolish.

10:13 presents details involving sabotage throughout Europe as well as states choosing to not disclose to their public about the nature of what is happening to avoid spooking their citizens https://youtu.be/6KVnJqaBsnk?t=613&si=8lgB4A7x2fSmJC4N

NATO’s Admiral Rob Bauer discusses what he is at liberty to disclose to Arctic nations https://youtu.be/DjpALbzKdJM?si=b4uU2KZ18JlNW5wf

I’m willing to trust what he’s saying verses online discourse where individuals will never have the level of insight as someone in his position.

That's why I said it would be interesting to see how insurance companies decide on this. The insurance companies definitely would want this to be considered an act of war, I would expect, so they wouldn't have to pay out. But an act of war against a NATO country would be a much bigger deal, so I would expect that the governments of the necessary countries to not want this to be considered one and we'll have to wait and see what shakes out from all of this.

UNCLOS Article 113 seems to say (to this non-lawyer) that the merchant ship operating country is responsible for punishment, and the only protection is if the mariners can prove that they "acted merely with the legitimate object of saving their lives or their ships, after having taken all necessary precautions to avoid such break or injury." Article 114 says that the merchant ship owner is responsible for the cost of repairs.

So that means, if it can be proven that Yi Peng 3 was responsible for this, then it's going to be on the Ningbo Yipeng Shipping Company to pay, and the PRC to punish. From what I have been able to find, that is a small shipping company with just two ships, one of which is currently unable to operate due to being stuck in the Kattegat. I suspect that means that not much money would be available from that direction, and so I wonder if the insurance companies would be on the hook for whatever excess costs are born by the various companies.

Yes but he's not a lawyer. We're not talking about military strategy. Sabotage is not necessarily an act of war. Sabotage can also be simple crime. Crime is not excluded from insurance payouts.

Think about the MV Dali that crashed into the bridge in Baltimore. Was that an act of war by Singapore against the United states? Six people actually died in that case.

I think you're conclusions are correct that it's most likely shipping company/insurance would have to pay. If there's no money I think usually they seize the ships and sell them.

There are multiple contexts at play here. It’s ambiguous, and multiple parties want to keep it that way for their own reasons.

Russia/China/US would I’m sure like to keep plausible deniability here, as it minimizes outright repercussions (for everyone), while still keeping the option on the table for them to tit-for-tat.

It wouldn’t surprise me if any insurance involved (which surely wouldn’t pay out in event of war) would want to claim it was an act of war.

Anyone trying to claim against such insurance would want to claim it wasn’t an act of war (just a mistake), so they could get the payout.

Sabotage committed by a foreign power could be considered an act of war though….

Who would claim what depends on who benefits from what type of claim, I expect.