TEHRAN -- The global internet is not ethereal. It is physical — and it runs through Iran’s sovereign territory.
More than 99 percent of intercontinental data traffic travels through submarine cables buried on the ocean floor, while satellites carry less than one percent. 
These cables form the backbone of government communications, global finance, cloud computing, and the internet itself. 
According to TeleGeography’s 2026 map, the global network comprises 694 cable systems and 1,893 landing stations. Ownership has shifted from state telecom consortia to technology giants: Google holds stakes in 34 systems, Meta in 20.
The Strait of Hormuz — long the world’s most critical energy artery — has become a digital chokepoint of equal strategic consequence. At least seven major cable systems pass through these waters, linking Persian Gulf states to data centers worldwide. 
Among them, FALCON and GBI pass directly through Iran’s territorial waters. These cables sit on Iran’s sovereign seabed. That fact alone establishes Tehran’s fully legitimate legal basis to regulate them.
Legal protection for submarine cables dates to the 1884 Paris Convention, later incorporated into the 1958 Geneva Convention and the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). 
UNCLOS creates a protective regime in the high seas and exclusive economic zone: Articles 58 and 87 guarantee the freedom to lay cables, and Articles 112 to 115 obligate states to protect them. For the continental shelf, Article 79 permits coastal states to take “reasonable measures” for resource exploration.
But everything changes at the 12-nautical-mile territorial sea. Under Article 2 of UNCLOS, the coastal state’s sovereignty there is absolute — extending to the water column, the airspace above, the seabed, and the subsoil beneath. 
Not one of the protective measures in Articles 112 to 115 applies within the territorial sea. UNCLOS is entirely silent. No article obligates a coastal state to permit foreign cables on its territorial seabed, or to refrain from imposing tolls, taxes, and customs rules.
This is the “UNCLOS Territorial Sea Blind Spot.” When a submarine cable enters territorial waters, it exits the international legal regime and falls under the coastal state’s domestic criminal and civil jurisdiction. That is not an Iranian invention. It is black-letter law.
Iran signed UNCLOS in 1982 but has never bound itself through parliamentary ratification. It attached a comprehensive interpretive declaration stating that “transit passage” through international straits is a contractual quid pro quo among convention members — not customary international law. 
States not party to the convention, most prominently the United States, therefore have no right to its contractual benefits. They must respect customary rules and the coastal state’s domestic law.
Iran’s position is further reinforced by the doctrine of the “persistent objector.” Even if transit passage were crystallizing into custom — which Iran rejects — a state that has opposed it continuously, openly, and consistently since its inception is exempt from it. Iran’s record since 1982 is a textbook example.
The apex of Iran’s legislative sovereignty is the 1993 Law of the Maritime Zones of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Article 1 declares Iranian sovereignty over the “airspace, seabed, and subsoil” of the territorial sea in the Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz, and Sea of Oman. 
Installing any communications cable on that seabed is, under Iranian law, an intrusion requiring compliance with domestic regulations.
Article 2 sets the territorial sea at 12 nautical miles. Because Iranian islands — Abu Musa, the Tunbs, Qeshm, Larak — each possess their own 12-mile belt, Iran’s sovereign radius extends across all safe navigation routes. 
Articles 5 and 6 subject foreign passage exclusively to innocent passage and list acts that render it non-innocent, including intelligence gathering, disruption of communications, and “any scientific research, surveying, seismic work, and sampling.” 
That last clause directly covers cable-laying and repair vessels, which must survey the seabed before laying cable. Article 8 permits suspension of passage to defend security. Article 9 requires prior approval for warships and submarines.
Iran has the right to apply its domestic laws to FALCON and GBI. It can require Big Tech — Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon — to obtain transit permits, pay ongoing passage fees, and secure operating licenses for infrastructure physically embedded in Iranian sovereign territory.
This is not treaty violation. Under Article 2 of UNCLOS, the territorial seabed is under the coastal state’s undisputed sovereignty. Iran is simply applying its tax and privacy laws to infrastructure on its soil.
Traditional maritime law forbids tolls for innocent passage except for specific services. But no obligation exists to provide free infrastructure and navigation services to foreign technology giants. 
Iran is fully entitled to demand maintenance, passive defense, and sovereign service costs — a fair balance between Iran’s public costs and the vast commercial interests of multinational corporations. For fixed infrastructure buried in the territorial seabed, this argument is stronger than for ships, because UNCLOS imposes no equivalent restriction.
What is unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz is not a shipping dispute. It is a redefinition of how sovereignty applies to the physical infrastructure of the internet. 
Iran’s legal position is grounded in UNCLOS itself, in its own consistent state practice, and in a comprehensive domestic legal framework built over four decades. Tehran is not asking for a new right. 
It is asserting a right that already exists — and that the world’s technology giants have simply never been asked to respect.