10
A Democratic Licence to Operate
Figure 1: Global Submarine Cable Map.
Source: <http://www.submarinecablemap.com/>
1.17
The use of submarine cables is an evolution of the first cables that carried telegraph
messages at seven words a minute in the late nineteenth century. The first international
fibre-optic cable connected the UK and Belgium in 1986. Each cable may consist of
multiple ‘bearers’24 and there are approximately 100,000 such bearers joining up the
Internet.25 Today, a single cable can carry millions of telephone calls, together with huge
amounts of Internet data, such as video.26 Given the UK’s location between the US and
Europe, an estimated 10 to 25 per cent of the world’s Internet traffic transits the UK via
submarine cables.27
The World Wide Web
1.18
The three layers described above are part of the architecture of the Internet. For most
people, their use of the Internet is via the World Wide Web (henceforth, the Web). While
many people use the words Internet and Web interchangeably, they are different. The
24. Each fibre optic cable may carry several ‘bearers’ which can carry up to 10 gigabits of data
per second.
25. ISC, Privacy and Security: A Modern and Transparent Legal Framework (London: The
Stationery Office, 2015), p. 26.
26. International Cable Protection Committee, ‘About Submarine Telecommunications Cables’,
2011, <https://www.iscpc.org/publications/>.
27. David Anderson, A Question of Trust: Report of the Investigatory Powers Review [Anderson
Report] (London: The Stationery Office, 2015), p. 51.