Iran demands Big Tech pay fees for undersea Internet cables in Strait of Hormuz
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/iran-demands-big-tech-pay-fees-for-undersea-internet-cables-in-strait-of-hormuz/?utm_source=bluesky&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_social-type=owned
30 Comments
This just in: desperate broke terrorists attempting to take anything they can hostage to assuage their own feelings of powerlessness and lack of oil income from U.S. blockade.
Iran is not in a position to be making demands.
They really lost the plot
lol iran making business moves
Don’t you all see yet, this will never de-escalate.
Ooooh, international extortion. Bold move.
Iran just had a bulb light effect… We could’ve been charging these fuckers all along
You mean tech companies that have a subscription model till perpetuity won’t like a subscription model for internet cable security as a service…..wonder why?
The Islamic Republic of Iran is like the Black Knight in Monty Python, making ridiculous demands and mocking King Arthur even after losing all his limbs. Iran’s leaders are absolutely demented.
Oh they always do shit like this to us Iranians.
They cut off the internet for us in iran, then introduced something called “pro internet” where you pay 2 million (around 12$ for 50 gigabyte) So you can regain access to websites such as youtube or Instagram.
It may not look like much, but since the minimum wage is around 100USD per month, it’s a lot for Iranians. In short, they took the internet hostage, and are taking ransom from people to let them use it in most basic stuff possible.
Prepare for more stuff like this from them, and some idiots will justify it for them.
What are the chances they start cutting wires if people that dont pay?
Thank you America. So. Much. Winning.
/S
Or maybe we just shut of your internet forever.
What a shitshow Trump and Netanyahu caused.
Is this the same Big Tech that co-owns the US?
I guess the draft is back on
They are utilizing the Trump playbook! Ask for money for everything, he definitely taught them the art of the deal!
Who cares if they cut them? The internet is designed to route around blockages. And the traffic flowing through those cables is likely unimportant to American big tech companies.
My biggest concern is that trump is going to declare victory and then republicans are going to blame the 2028 democratic president for this situation. Similar to what trump did with the Afghanistan pullout.
At the end of the day though, even though this situation is trump’s fault, we’re still going to have to deal with it eventually sadly.
Well done Trump and especially the republicans who let him clown
Back to the age of pirates. People forget that it’s America and it’s support for freedom of navigation that made the current globalized world possible.
Imagine if all countries started extorting money for anything that passed close enough.
The Strait was free and now Iran show the world it can build a tool booth on it. LoL
Regardless of the reaction to US and Israel ill-conceived strikes, Iran will find out soon that they will not be able to hold world economy hostage.
This strategy will be short lived.
Ugh, why start a war you were never going to finish. If you talked to any anthropologist specialized in that region, they could have told you it was going to fail.
And if you were going to assassinate the leaders, you should have just kept doing that, until no one was left to take the head position.
Instead, you just wasted a bunch of money taking out things that didn’t really stop them from anything, and wasted 50%+ of the US arsenal.
And you didn’t even arm the people for them to even stand a chance of starting a rebellion, and completely missed the timing on trying to take them out.
This is a fail on all levels. What objectives did you achieve Trump? IRGC will not capitulate. They are still fucking over the Straight. Their people are worse off. And the current government is still in power.
Was the play here to play a long game, take out their infrastructure, and wait decades for them to fall from local warlords fighting over water resources? Was it to wait out their allies and until they can’t supply them with raw materials and/or weapons and drones?
Or was it because you sold the us out to Israel and your BFF netanyahu.
Can you commie socialist Chinese Iranian anarchist islamic athiest trans Canadians stop complaining so much?
The important thing about this is getting a giant golden ballroom!
Stop whining about irrelevant stuff like an upcoming oil shortage, skyrocketing prices, fertilizer shortages US bonds having higher and higher interest rates, etc.
What matters is that our country finally gets the giant golden ballroom we need!
jeez .. almost as if it were a bad idea to disrupt one of the top 5 geographic choke-points of global commerce.
Why are there so many eggs in this particular basket?
We have so many other baskets and sure it’s not like everything ever is in this one, but it seems like this was a decades long bad idea to have so many critical eggs in such a conflict rife part of the world with potential to get worse. Which it now is!
Were they planing on humanity or at minimum America NOT being stupid at some point on the future?
I was waiting for them to start this….
Here we go now
Now just imagine them with nukes….
just fuck this country
Fucking Trump the dumb fuck