• Undersea cables between Finland-Germany and Lithuania-Sweden were cut, potentially sabotaged.
• The incident is one of a number of similar incidents in recent years, highlighting the vulnerability of these lines.
• NATO is enhancing surveillance and coordination to protect critical underwater infrastructure.

Last month, an underwater data cable between Finland and Germany and another between Lithuania and Sweden were discovered cut within a day of each other. The damage to the cables, which European officials said appeared deliberate, highlights just how vulnerable these critical undersea lines are.

Yi Peng 3, a Chinese-flagged cargo ship that had departed from Russia's Ust-Luga port in the Gulf of Finland three days before and was tracked loitering near the two locations, is suspected in connection with the incident. It is said to have dragged an anchor over 100 miles, damaging the cables.

"No one believes that these cables were accidentally cut," German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said in November. "We have to assume it is sabotage," he added.

In a joint statement with his Finnish counterpart, Pistorius said the damage comes at a time when "our European security is not only under threat from Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine but also from hybrid warfare by malicious actors."

As Russia received added scrutiny, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied Russian involvement in the incident, saying that "it is quite absurd to continue to blame Russia for everything without any reason."

Critical but vulnerable

In recent years, a string of incidents involving damage to underwater infrastructure has occurred, many of them in the same region.

Last year, Newnew Polar Bear, another Chinese cargo ship, damaged a gas pipeline running between Estonia and Finland. China's investigation concluded the damage was accidental; however, Estonia and Finland's investigation is still ongoing.

In 2022, a Norwegian underwater data cable was damaged, and there were indications of human involvement in that incident. In 2021, a 2.5-mile-long section of another data cable disappeared from waters north of Norway.

The incident that received the most attention, though, was the sabotage of the Nord Steam gas pipelines between Russia and Germany in September 2022. There have been indications that Ukrainian elements might have been behind the sabotage, but this has not been confirmed.

Underwater infrastructure is increasingly critical to modern life. The vast majority of internet traffic passes through underwater fiber-optics cables, and underwater energy pipelines are common in many regions. But protecting this infrastructure, which can stretch for hundreds or thousands of miles, is difficult.

"There's no way that we can have NATO presence alone all these thousands of kilometers of undersea, offshore infrastructure," then-NATO leader Jens Stoltenberg said in 2023. Yet, NATO can be better at collecting and sharing information and intelligence "and connecting the dots," he added.

Indeed, NATO and the European Union are trying to do that.

In May this year, NATO held its first Critical Undersea Infrastructure Network meeting and launched its Maritime Centre for the Security of Critical Undersea Infrastructure to better coordinate the capabilities of its members and increase collaboration between them.

Further, the EU is funding several initiatives to develop uncrewed surface and underwater systems to surveil critical areas and detect threats early.

But there are also legal difficulties to protecting underwater infrastructure, as it usually traverses the territorial waters of several countries and can also pass through international waters.

The usual suspects

Although it can often be difficult to establish a culprit whenever such infrastructure is damaged, officials have pointed out that Russian activity near underwater cables has intensified.

In 2017, the US admiral in charge of NATO's submarine forces said the alliance was "seeing Russian underwater activity in the vicinity of undersea cables that I don't believe we have ever seen."

The war in Ukraine has added another dimension to this matter.

"There are heightened concerns that Russia may target undersea cables and other critical infrastructure in an effort to disrupt Western life, to gain leverage against those nations that are providing security to Ukraine," David Cattler, NATO's intelligence chief, said last year.

Russia has developed a number of underwater capabilities and has a specialized unit, the Main Directorate for Deep Sea Research, committed to the task.

GUGI, as the operation is also known, is an elite Russian unit that employs specialized surface and underwater vessels capable of underwater sabotage and surveillance. Yantar, one of GUGI's special-purpose spy vessels, which nominally acts as a survey vessel, has often been spotted near underwater cables.

Furthermore, a joint investigation released in 2023 by the public broadcasters of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland discovered that Russia, over the past decade, employed a fleet of 50 boats — masking as research or commercial vessels — to gather intelligence on allied underwater cables and wind farms in the Nordic region.

"When you look at the evidence of their activities now, the places they are doing surveys, overlaid with this critical undersea infrastructure … you can see that they are at least signaling that they have the intent and the capability to take action in this domain if they choose," Cattler said.

• YouTube TV will cost close to $83 a month after a just-announced price hike.
• That's a far cry from the $35 a month it was when it launched in 2017.
• However, YouTube TV is arguably still attractive relative to some other pay-TV offerings.

The price of YouTube TV is going up again — and cord-cutters around the internet are up in arms.

Google announced Thursday that the cost of its popular pay-TV service is now $82.99 a month for new users, up from $72.99. Existing users will see the price hike start on January 13, so some might not pay more until February.

The last time the service raised prices was in March 2023.

YouTube TV is now roughly in line with a typical pay-TV bundle and will cost exactly as much as rival service Hulu + Live TV, which includes ad-supported versions of Hulu, Disney+, and ESPN+.

YouTube TV's price has grown dramatically in the nearly eight years since it launched, though that's largely because the service was underpriced at first relative to its offering.

Before this hike, YouTube TV was generally cheaper than many rival streaming TV packages from competitors such as Hulu + Live TV, Fubo TV, Spectrum, and DirecTV. (Many pay-TV services have a variety of plans, so it can be difficult to truly compare apples to apples, however.)

YouTube TV also has a slick interface that appeals to many cord-cutters.

These factors helped YouTube TV grow to 8 million customers (as of earlier this year) and far outpace its digital rivals.

Although YouTube TV's price growth has been eye-popping, the price of pay-TV services — from cable to satellite to streamers — has generally outpaced inflation, per data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. That includes the largest inflation surge in decades.

As the cable bundle became more expensive, millions of households cut the cord. TV networks make less money when pay-TV subscriptions fall, so to keep investors happy, they've increased the amount they charge TV providers, who then pass those costs on to customers.

In other words, when fewer people pay for TV, the remaining subscribers pay more. That has created a flywheel effect, with customers fleeing the bundle even faster in favor of streaming services, social media, or other forms of entertainment.

When asked for comment, a YouTube TV spokesperson issued a statement that acknowledged this dynamic: "To keep up with the rising cost of content and the investments we make in the quality of our service, we are increasing our Base Plan price for YouTube TV from $72.99/month to $82.99/month."

Google may also have raised YouTube TV prices to help cover its investment in NFL Sunday Ticket. The tech giant won the right to distribute the premium out-of-market package starting in 2023 and priced it at $379 per season for YouTube TV customers and $479 for others. Even at those prices, media analysts at Morgan Stanley don't think the service is profitable.

Still, despite the price increase, YouTube TV can often be one of the better deals in town for those who want a large bundle of channels. And it has another thing going for it: It's easy to cancel and resubscribe to.

"We give all members the flexibility to cancel their membership at any time," the YouTube TV spokesperson said in their statement.

• Warner Bros. Discovery is splitting its linear TV business from streaming and studios.
• Comcast last month also spun off its cable networks — except Bravo — into a stand-alone company.
• The moves illustrate a cable business in decline, with both repositioning for M&A opportunities.

Warner Bros. Discovery is separating its linear television business from its streaming business and film studios.

It follows a similar move by Comcast, which announced in November it would spin off all of its NBCUniversal cable networks except Bravo into a stand-alone company.

The new corporate structure will be complete by the middle of next year, WBD said. Unlike Comcast, WBD won't spin its assets off into a separate company.

A new Global Linear Networks division will house TV properties like the Discovery Channel and CNN, while the Streaming & Studios side will be the home of Max and movie studio Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group.

"Our Global Linear Networks business is well positioned to continue to drive free cash flow, while our Streaming & Studios business focuses on driving growth," WBD president and CEO David Zaslav said in a statement.

A source with direct knowledge of the matter said the move was meant to clean up the company's structure, which was formed in 2022 from the combination of WarnerMedia and Discovery. (Discovery itself was the product of its acquisition of Scripps Networks in 2017.)

This person said the company is still determining how the specific business units will be divided, and no leadership changes were planned.

The moves by both Comcast and WBD illuminate a cable business increasingly in decline. Their repositioning of properties could help them participate in potential mergers and acquisitions expected to reshape the media and entertainment industry in 2025.

Warner Bros. Discovery was supposed to create scale and value and help compete with Big Tech by mashing WarnerMedia's prestige networks like HBO and CNN with Discovery's lifestyle properties like HGTV. But its stock has sunk to about a third of its value at the time of its creation in 2022. (It was up about 14% Thursday morning on the news of the new organization.)

Industry observers say a Comcast-like spin wouldn't be favorable for WBD because it needs the cash from its linear channels to pay down the heavy debt it took on to form the company.

Still, they see WBD bulking up or shedding channels, with Paramount Global or Comcast seen as the most likely merger partners.

The announcement was met with mixed reactions from analysts. BofA Securities, which has long argued that WBD should sell assets or merge with another company, said in a note that it saw WBD's linear assets as a logical partner for the Comcast SpinCo, while its streaming and studio assets could be an attractive takeover target for multiple suitors.

Longtime ad industry advisor Brian Wieser said that as with the Comcast SpinCo, a WBD separation weakens the company on a few fronts, though. Without being tethered to the cable channels, he said, it'll be harder for WBD's streamer Max to grow its ads business, which is becoming increasingly important. The linear networks will lose leverage in distribution negotiations without Max and have trouble attracting talent if they're seen as a declining business, among other issues, he said.

In July, WBD reportedly floated the idea to investors of essentially undoing the 2022 merger to create the two separate divisions. And in August, the company said its TV assets were worth $9 billion less than it had anticipated just two years ago.

• Meta plans a $10 billion global underwater cable project spanning 25,000 miles, TechCrunch reported.
• The project is reportedly in the early planning stages, though the exact route has not been announced.
• Meta aims for sole cable ownership of the cable, avoiding geopolitical tension areas like the Red Sea.

Meta is reportedly planning to build a fiber-optic underwater cable that would traverse the globe, TechCrunch reported.

Sources close to Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, said the company may spend over $10 billion on a nearly 25,000-mile project. Meta would reportedly own 100% of the cable's capacity, per TechCrunch. It's unclear what role, if any, AI plays in the project's motivations.

TechCrunch reported the project is in its early stages, but the intended capacity and route are not public. Planning is reportedly being led by Meta's South Africa office.

Underwater fiber-optic cables are frequently used to carry telecommunication signals over large areas of water. Meta is part owner of various cables including 2Africa, a submarine telecommunications cable extending across Africa's coastline.

Google is the sole owner of 17 submarine cable holdings, while Amazon and Microsoft are part owners in a handful, telecom analyst Teleography found.

Entrepreneur Sunil Tagare first reported the plan, telling TechCrunch that the cable would cost $2 billion but would jump to over $10 billion in the next five to 10 years. Tagare told TechCrunch that he speculates India's capacity to build data centers more cheaply than the US could explain why the cable may end in India.

"It will start on the East Coast of the US and go straight to India with a stop in South Africa (for powering and restoration purposes)," Tagare wrote on LinkedIn. "And it will also go from India straight to the Western Coast of the US with a powering and restoration stop in Darwin, Australia — avoiding the Red Sea, the South China Sea and more importantly Egypt, Marseilles, the Straits of Malacca and Singapore — all of whom are now major single points of failure."

The project would take years to complete, given limited resources like cable ships, TechCrunch reported.

TechCrunch reported that the cables could also be strategically placed to avoid areas of geopolitical tension where cables have been damaged, such as the Baltic or Red Seas.

Meta did not respond to a request for comment.

Meta, the parent of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is the second-biggest driver of internet usage globally. Its properties — and their billions of users — account for 10% of all fixed and 22% of all mobile traffic. Meta’s investments into artificial intelligence stand to boost that usage even further. So to make sure it will […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

• A Chinese cargo ship is under investigation related to severed data cables in the Baltic Sea.
• A probe found that the vessel steamed ahead while dragging its anchor for over 100 miles.
• Western officials believe Russia likely orchestrated the attack on EU maritime infrastructure.

Two key undersea data cables in the Baltic Sea were severed earlier this month, prompting an investigation into a Chinese cargo ship for suspected sabotage.

European authorities said the Chinese-flagged bulk carrier, identified as Yi Peng 3, dragged its anchor over the Baltic seabed for over 100 miles, cutting the critical internet cables that link four NATO countries.

A timeline of events

On November 15, Yi Peng 3 departed from Russia's Ust-Luga port on the Baltic Sea carrying Russian fertilizer.

The Ust-Luga port is the largest universal port on the Baltic Sea and the Kremlin's second-largest port after Novorossiysk on the Black Sea. Since Sweden and Finland joined the alliance, the Baltic Sea has been referred to as "NATO lake" because it is almost entirely populated by alliance members.

Two days later, investigators established that the Chinese vessel dropped its anchor around 9 p.m. local time, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. However, the ship continued steaming with its anchor dropped and is believed to have severed an undersea telecoms cable connecting Sweden and Lithuania, per The Journal.

Investigators said Yi Peng 3 continued to sail for another 111 miles with its dragging anchor, which then cut the only communications cable connecting Finland with Germany less than twenty-four hours later.

It was only then that investigators said the vessel raised anchor and continued its route.

It's highly unusual for any vessel to drag its anchor for this long due to the dangers and fuel waste, an impediment that cannot go unnoticed by the ship's watch-standers. A crew typically recovers the anchor, or in the worst case, jettisons it, before steaming ahead.

The Chinese bulk carrier is now anchored in the Kattegat Strait and is being monitored by Danish naval patrol vessels as European authorities continue to investigate the potential sabotage.

Concerns of potential sabotage

Investigators said Yi Peng 3's movements couldn't be charted after it went "dark," meaning that the ship's transponder was shut down or disabled, thus obscuring its position.

Open-source satellite imagery, however, reportedly placed the Chinese ship near the damaged cables at the time of the respective incidents.

An investigator on the case told The Journal that it's "extremely unlikely" that the ship's captain wouldn't have noticed the vessel's dragging anchor.

"It's extremely unlikely that the captain would not have noticed that his ship dropped and dragged its anchor, losing speed for hours and cutting cables on the way," the investigator said.

An analysis by Kpler, a global trade analytics firm, provided to The Journal found that "given the mild weather conditions and manageable wave heights, the likelihood of accidental anchor dragging appears minimal."

Germany's Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said he believed the incident was a result of potential sabotage, telling reporters last week that "nobody believes that these cables were accidentally severed."

"We have to know that, without knowing specifically who it came from, that it is a hybrid action, and we also have to assume that, without knowing by whom yet, that this is sabotage," Pistorius said.

Russia accused of waging 'hybrid warfare'

Yi Peng 3's origin of departure raised concerns over potential Russian involvement in the incident, possibly in connection to the war in Ukraine.

Though the Chinese vessel and associated parties are under investigation over damaged cables, Western officials believe that Russian intelligence agencies orchestrated the incident.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied Russian involvement, calling the accusations "absurd."

"It's quite absurd to keep blaming Russia for everything without any grounds. It is laughable in the context of the lack of any reaction to Ukraine's sabotage activities in the Baltic Sea," Peskov told reporters on November 20.

Foreign ministers of Finland and Germany released a joint statement on November 18, saying they were "deeply concerned" about the incident, which "immediately raises suspicions of intentional damage [and] speaks volumes about the volatility of our times.

"Our European security is not only under threat from Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine but also from hybrid warfare by malicious actors," the ministers said in the statement. "Safeguarding our shared critical infrastructure is vital to our security and the resilience of our societies."

The incident in the Baltic Sea comes just weeks after US officials warned that Russia would likely target undersea cables and other critical maritime infrastructure.

"We are concerned about heightened Russian naval activity worldwide and that Russia's decision calculus for damaging US and allied undersea critical infrastructure may be changing," a US official told CNN in September.

The official added that "Russia is continuing to develop naval capabilities for undersea sabotage" through its dedicated military unit known as the General Staff Main Directorate for Deep Sea Research, or GUGI.

China complying with the investigation

Denmark's foreign ministry said in a statement earlier this week that investigators were engaged in ongoing "diplomatic dialogue" with the countries "most involved in handling this case, including China."

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson confirmed the talks in a statement last Friday, saying Beijing "is currently working with relevant parties, including Denmark, to maintain smooth communication through diplomatic channels."

Chinese company Ningbo Yipeng Shipping, which owns Yi Peng 3, is also cooperating with the probe and allowed the vessel to be stopped while Swedish and German authorities negotiate access to the ship and its crew, The Journal reported.

The vessel's crew, which also includes a Russian sailor, has yet to be questioned due to restrictions under international maritime law.

• Comcast plans to spin off the bulk of its NBCUniversal cable channels.
• The planned spinoff includes MSNBC, CNBC, E!, and Oxygen, among others.
• NBC, Bravo, and the streaming service Peacock would not be spun off under the plan.

Comcast is planning to break off the bulk of its cable television channels.

The plan to spin off some NBCUniversal channels includes MSNBC, CNBC, USA, Oxygen, E!, Syfy, and the Golf Channel, while NBC, Bravo, and the streaming service Peacock will remain under NBCUniversal, Comcast president Mike Cavanagh announced in a memo to NBCU employees viewed by Business Insider.

The assets that are part of the planned spinoff generated $7 billion in revenue during the year that ended in September, according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported that the spinoff was going ahead.

The spinoff, dubbed "SpinCo" for now, which would take about a year, will enable growth in NBCUniversal's remaining assets, Cavanagh wrote in his memo.

"The well-capitalized, independent company will be positioned to lead in the changing landscape for cable networks given the strength of its portfolio and the quality and focus of its management team," Cavanagh wrote. "SpinCo will provide a diverse and differentiated content offering that will reach approximately 70 million U.S. households, making it highly attractive to investors, content creators, distributors, consumers, and potential partners. The company will have significant cash flow, a strong balance sheet, and the financial flexibility to pursue growth opportunities, both organically and potentially through acquisitions."

He wrote that the new entity's ownership structure would be similar to Comcast's and that Mark Lazarus, currently chairman of NBCUniversal's media group, would be named CEO.

Comcast said it was exploring spinning off its cable networks late last month, with BI's Peter Kafka writing that the move served as yet another signal of cable TV's decline.

Analysts said Comcast could increase its valuation by selling its cable networks, though they were unsure if it would actually work out, BI previously reported.

"Carving out the US cable networks, which include USA, CNBC, and E!, without Peacock or the NBC broadcast network would be odd," Michael Hodel, a media analyst at financial-services firm Morningstar, previously wrote. "The cable networks likely have little value on their own. A spinoff would have to be part of a larger strategic move, like merging with another firm."

Other media giants are wrestling with what to do about their declining traditional TV channels. Disney CEO Bob Iger in the past floated the idea of selling Disney's TV and cable channels. On its earnings call last week, Disney retreated that idea, though, suggesting that the price wouldn't be high enough and that it would be too complex to separate them from the rest of the company.

That complexity hovers over Comcast as well. NBCU's various TV channels are tightly integrated, sharing back-office functions and talent that would have to be untangled, for one.

This article was originally published on November 19 and has been updated with new details of the planned spinoff.