Law of the Sea Treaty Has Big Implications for Telecom, Consumer Electronics
Industry officials on Thursday urged Senate approval of the Law of the Sea Treaty, saying it is critical to industry, from consumer electronics to telecom. Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam was among those to testify at a hearing by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The U.S. is the only industrialized nation not a party to the treaty, which dates to 1982.
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Chairman John Kerry, D-Mass., said he was initially surprised to hear from executives before the hearing about how important the treaty is to industries like telecom. “As we'll hear shortly, we have vast undersea cable networks and they provide a backbone for the world’s voice and data networks,” Kerry said. “When there is a problem, if a country were to seek to block a company from laying cables or impeding the repair of damaged cables, the Law of the Sea [Treaty] provides redress. A party to the treaty can bring suit on behalf of its companies within the context of a Law of the Sea agreement.”
Approval of the treaty also means U.S. companies will gain international recognition for deep-sea mining claims, important to the harvesting of rare earth minerals essential in the manufacturing of everything from cellphones to consumer electronics devices, Kerry said. Kerry said he first learned of the importance of the treaty at a dinner with U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Donohue 18 months ago. “At the very end of the dinner, Tom turned to me and he said, ‘By the way, when are you going to get this Law of the Sea Treaty done?'” Kerry said. “I was completely taken aback. That was the last thing I expected to hear about at the dinner."
Ranking Member Richard Lugar, R-Ind., agreed with Kerry it’s time for the Senate to vote on the long-stalled treaty.
"A wide range of domestic industries including … consumer electronics need the treaty to enable access to new sources of mineral resources, including rare earth minerals, which lie in massive deposits on or beneath the deep seaboard floor,” Donohue told the committee.
"As a major communications company utilizing the international seabed to provide voice, video, Internet and data services over a network of more than 80 submarine cables,” McAdam said, “Fiberoptic submarine cables are the lifeblood of U.S. carriers’ global business and the digital trade route of the 21st century.” McAdam noted that aside from traffic routed through Canada or Mexico, more than 95 percent of international communications traffic travels over 38 submarine cables “each roughly the diameter of a garden hose.”
Without submarine cables, satellite connections could carry only 7 percent of U.S.-international traffic, McAdam said. “Any disruption to the global submarine network can have a significant effect on the flow of digital information around the world as well as an impact on the world economy.” In some cases, U.S. carriers have to work through nations that have signed the treaty when disputes have arisen over cables, he said. U.S. companies “have to ask them, frankly, to carry our water for us,” McAdam said. “It seems almost an assault on our sovereignty that we have to go do that because we don’t have a seat at the table."