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WASHINGTON — The Federal Communications Commission unanimously approved a notice of proposed rulemaking today that would require submarine cable operators to report outages. These undersea cables link crucial communications between the mainland United States, its island territories, and the rest of the world.

The following statement can be attributed to Joshua Stager, Policy Counsel for ������Ƶ’s Open Technology Institute:

“We applaud the Commission for focusing its attention on submarine cables, an opaque part of the Internet’s architecture that needs greater oversight. Most online traffic travels through submarine cables at some point, and yet we know very little about when this part of the network fails. A single cable outage can disrupt entire regions, as we saw in the Northern Marianas Islands earlier this year when an outage knocked out the territory’s access to the Internet and forced a shutdown of its banking system. We need more data about these outages to strengthen the Internet’s resilience and to protect people from future disruptions. Today’s unanimous vote is a prudent step toward that aim.”