On Thursday morning, the head of Verizon became the latest telecommunications industry executive to testify on Capitol Hill in support of the Law of the Sea, a major international treaty which was signed in 1982 and ratified by major world powers, including the European Union, China, Japan, Russia, Canada, India, Australia, Mexico and many others.

"Given their importance to global networks and the world economy, there must be an appropriate legal framework based upon global cooperation and the rule of law to protect submarine cables," CEO Lowell McAdam told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The United States, along with nearly all countries in the world, has been a signatory to the treaty since 1994, but has not ratified it into law. This year, there has been a renewed push, particularly by Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), the chair on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to have the upper house of the American legislative body approve and ratify this 30-year-old treaty. The Clinton and Bush Administrations pushed for ratification before a full Senate floor vote, but did not manage to bring it to the floor. American conservatives are largely against the treaty, as they view it as an international encroachment against American sovereignty—and more practically, supporters haven't had the two-thirds majority to pass it.

Sen. Kerry has been forceful in bringing industry leaders, particularly from the telecommunications industry, to Washington, DC, to lend their support to passage of the treaty.

So, why are AT&T, Verizon, Level 3, the Telecommunications Industry Association, and others throwing their weight behind the treaty now? Largely, it has to do with enforcement of legal decisions for disputes involving the laying of submarine data cables.

"The convention includes meaningful dispute resolution procedures [...] that relate to the operation and implementation of subsea cables," said John Ryan, the chief legal officer at Level 3 Communication, in the Forum on the Law of the Sea, held last month in Washington.

"Under the treaty, parties that have access to the treaty have access to compulsory dispute resolution procedures that protect submarine cable operators against onerous and unreasonable permitting or coastal states who refuse to allow the installation of subsea cable facilities. That dispute resolution provisions are [sic] one of the principal benefits of the U.S. accepting the treaty. And it is one that U.S. companies do not currently enjoy while many of our competitors overseas do.”

Specifically, telcos are interested in Article 297, which reads:

"Disputes concerning the interpretation or application of this Convention with regard to the exercise by a coastal State of its sovereign rights or jurisdiction provided for in this Convention shall be subject to the procedures provided for in section 2 in the following cases: (a) when it is alleged that a coastal State has acted in contravention of the provisions of this Convention in regard to the freedoms and rights of navigation, overflight or the laying of submarine cables and pipelines, or in regard to other internationally lawful uses of the sea specified in article 58..."

Some experts believe that the United States’ ratification of the treaty would deter other countries from imposing arbitrarily long and arduous bureaucratic restrictions having to do with cable laying and repair.

"The failure of the United States to ratify this treaty increases the expense of cable installation and maintenance and increases the chances—when there’s a maintenance problem or cable damage—that it will be down for a longer period of time, because the US doesn’t have the ability to enforce treaty protections that allow access for cables and cable ships," said Kent Bressie, a telecommunications lawyer in Washington, DC, in a Wednesday conversation with Ars.

"China, for example, imposes a requirement for permits for cable ships entering its 200 nautical-mile exclusive economic zone, to do cable repair," he added. "That violates the treaty, but the US doesn't have any formal way to object to that."

Bressie also wrote in an e-mail that this increases costs to cable owners, and eventually, also to ISPs and Internet customers, by forcing repair ships to idle at the cost of as high as $100,000 per day, and forcing telcos to pay for alternative facilities to route traffic around problematic areas.

"It may also disrupt service, making Internet content unavailable for certain periods of time and delaying execution of finance and trading transactions," he added by e-mail.

Once the United States does ratify the Law of the Sea, telecom companies could lobby Washington to use its power as a government to pursue complaint and enforcement mechanisms as laid out in the treaty.

Verizon's testimony "unprecedented"

Industry watchers have taken notice of the increased lobbying efforts on the Hill.

"McAdam's testimony is a powerful statement that this technology we never think about is utterly crucial to their core business of international communications," wrote Andrew Blum, in an instant message sent to Ars on Wednesday.

In his book, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, which Ars reviewed earlier this month, Blum describes the physical infrastructure of the Internet, paying particular attention to international data cables.

"Verizon has not been in the habit of talking about their submarine cables," he added. "And here they're declaring their absolute importance, and asking that Congress step up in helping to protect them."

Others have speculated that United States companies like Verizon, but more importantly others, like Level 3 Communications, which own their own fiber, are very concerned that their data continues to flow across international waters. That’s particularly true when the bulk of large content worldwide (music, films, software) are hosted from US-based servers. The only time data doesn’t flow, of course, is when those cables are disrupted.

"In recent years, a lot of the subsea cable industry's attention has turned to ways of minimizing operational costs," wrote Tim Stronge, vice president of research at TeleGeography, which monitors international data cables and related traffic around the globe, in an e-mail sent to Ars on Wednesday.

"It doesn't matter how advanced the technologies are and how cheap their unit costs are; repairing cables requires old-school expenses (hiring a ship crew paid per day, etc.)," he added. "Minimizing the regulatory/licensing fees for handling these repairs is important; also very important is minimizing the time to repair these faults. Some countries introduce unnecessary delays to repair due to red tape."

Beyond cable-laying, raw materials remain attractive

But there’s more than just disputes over cables. The Telecommunications Industry Association, a trade group that includes the likes of Alcatel-Lucent, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Georgia Tech and even the United States Department of Justice, is also supporting the Law of the Sea. But according to Danielle Coffey, a spokesperson for the TIA, there’s also an interest in the raw materials that are often found in the same maritime regions as cable-laying.

"Among other things, the United States will be given the authority to shape deep seabed rules of the International Seabed Authority (ISA), participation which relies upon the ratification of this Treaty," she told Ars on Tuesday.

"Practically, ratification of the Treaty provides assurances that there are legal protections in place for investments that have been made in our oceans, and that those investments may continue to bear fruit. Our companies have invested heavily in exploration activities of rare earth minerals as well as undersea cabling that has been laid by telecom carriers, and this investment should be protected and facilitated. Exploration of rare earth minerals in deep-sea beds and also access to undersea cabling are both critical to ensuring communications products and services are available to consumers, in the United States and globally."