Summary

  • 47 U.S.C. §34 makes landing or operating a cable that connects the United States with a foreign country an act requiring a written licence, and the two grants I read name companies rather than cables — one of them, CELIA, carries six named licensees.
  • The term is a licensee-started clock: 25 years from the in-service date the licensee reports within 30 days, not a date printed on the grant.
  • The statute hands the licensor a rate-and-service lever that neither modern grant uses. Both condition on an unpublished National Security Agreement and recite that non-compliance can terminate the licence "without further Commission action".

Everything quoted here is the wording reported in the source snapshots I retained on 13 November 2026: the three statute sections and three rule pages at Cornell's Legal Information Institute, the 2024 CFR volume at GovInfo, and two Commission notices published in 2025 and 2026. The provenance field on each of those snapshots reads provider_reported, which means the quoted words are what the retained snapshot reports, not text I lifted off the document body myself. That caveat attaches to each quotation below. It does not attach to my arithmetic.

What the statute actually licenses

47 U.S.C. §34 is one sentence doing the licensing work: "No person shall land or operate in the United States any submarine cable directly or indirectly connecting the United States with any foreign country... unless a written license to land or operate such cable has been issued by the President of the United States." The licensee named in the statute is the President; the same page carries the delegation note pointing to section 5(a) of Executive Order 10530, which is how this file comes to sit at the Commission.

§35 settles whether this is a licence or a registration, and settles it as a licence: "The President may withhold or revoke such license when he shall be satisfied after due notice and hearing that such action will assist in securing rights for the landing or operation of cables in foreign countries, or in maintaining the rights or interests of the United States or of its citizens in foreign countries, or will promote the security of the United States, or may grant such license upon such terms as shall be necessary to assure just and reasonable rates and service in the operation and use of cables so licensed." Three grounds to withhold or revoke, each behind notice and hearing, plus an express power to attach terms that assure just and reasonable rates and service.

§36 supplies the teeth on the other side: a district court, at the suit of the United States, may "enjoin the landing or operation of such cable or to compel, by injunction, the removal thereof." Nothing in the excerpt I hold states a criminal penalty.

So the statute's own design is a conditioned licence, and the conditions it names point at rates, service and the security of the United States. Hold that shape in mind, because the grants do something else.

What the two grants actually condition on

DA 25-717, Report No. SCL-00571, Office of International Affairs, published 14 August 2025, records a grant dated 12 August 2025 to Starfish Infrastructure Inc. under file number SCL-LIC-20241210-00048, covering a non-common-carrier fibre-optic system described as connecting Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands to French Polynesia and Chile. It says: "Starfish shall comply with the routine conditions specified in section 1.767(g) of the Commission's rules." It also conditions the grant on Starfish and Google complying with commitments in a National Security Agreement dated 18 July 2025, sets the term at 25 years after the cable's in-service date with notification due within 30 days, and recites that failure to comply with those commitments can terminate the licence "without further Commission action" and may bring monetary sanctions. A waiver of §1.767(h)(1) is recorded for Unicornfish Services Inc. The cable's name appears as "Halaiahi" in the grant description and as "Halaihai" in a later technical section of the same notice; I adopt neither spelling.

DA 26-801, Report No. SCL-00630, published 31 July 2026, opens with the sentence that tells you what the instrument is: "This public notice serves as each submarine cable landing licensee's Submarine Cable Landing License, or modification thereto". The licence goes to six named companies — Telxius Cable USA, Telxius Cable Puerto Rico, Telxius Cable América, Antigua Public Utilities Authority, France Telecom Long Distance USA d/b/a Orange Carriers USA, and SETAR N.V. — for one cable described as connecting Boca Raton, San Juan, Martinique, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint-Barthélemy, Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire. Conditions are §§1.70007 and 1.70009, route-specific reporting under §1.70015, and commitments in a National Security Agreement dated 9 July 2026. Same term, same 30-day notice, same recital that non-compliance is grounds for termination without further Commission action and may bring monetary sanctions.

Neither notice attaches a rate or service condition of the kind §35 authorises. Both attach a rulebook of routine conditions plus an agreement I could not read, and then make that unread agreement the stated termination ground.

Two rule eras, kept in separate boxes

§1.767 is the older track: application inputs in (a); executive-branch coordination, one application per system or per modification, renewal or extension, and electronic filing in (b), (e) and (n); routine conditions including the 30-day in-service notice and the 25-year term in (g); and minimum licensees in (h) — an entity controlling a US cable landing station, and an entity owning or controlling at least five per cent of the system and using US points. Its operative sentence on the term reads: "The cable landing license shall expire twenty-five (25) years from the in-service date, unless renewed or extended upon proper application."

The 2024 CFR edition corroborates that text, adds that a common-carrier applicant files a separate international section 214 authorisation, and predates the newer framework. It does not tell you which track governs any particular application. Neither do I.

The newer track is heavier. §1.70005 asks for a segment-by-segment description, lengths, branching units, fibre-pair counts, design capacity, landing-station and beach-manhole detail, NOC/SOC and PFE/SLTE locations, route-position data and anticipated in-service timing, plus ownership, foreign-carrier certifications, foreign-adversary and Covered List provider disclosures and a cybersecurity and physical-security risk-management certification; where the US landing station belongs to someone else, it wants the station owner's operational influence, US control, and a lease term coextensive with the 25-year licence. §1.70007 supplies routine conditions, keeps the 25-year term and the 30-day notice, and adds a service-commencement deadline of three years after grant.

The clock belongs to the licensee

Twenty-five years from the in-service date. Notification of that date due within 30 days. Read with the three-year commencement requirement as reported in §1.70007, the outer limit of a licence measured from the grant date is 3 + 25 = 28 years — my arithmetic on two printed periods, not a statement by the Commission.

Here is the part to carry away: the term's start is a fact the licensee supplies. No grant I read prints an expiry date, and neither notice points to a public place where an in-service notification lands. The answer to "when does this licence end" therefore begins life inside a licensee's filing rather than on the face of the licence a third party can read.

What a third party can check, and what it cannot

Checkable: which companies are licensed; which system each notice describes; which rule era the notice cites; the stated term and notification duty; the existence and date of a National Security Agreement; and the fact that non-compliance with it is recited as a termination ground.

Not checkable: what that agreement requires, who else signed it, how long the commitments run, and whether they bind a successor.

A competitor, a landing-state government or a capacity buyer can find the licence and cannot finish reading it.

Three consequences follow directly. A licence is not a clearance certificate, because the grant itself names the security commitments as the termination ground. The licensee is not necessarily the operator or the system's owner, because the minimum-licensee test reaches whoever controls the US landing station and whoever holds at least five per cent and uses US points. And a 25-year right with an unpublished core is exactly that.

Eleven dated boundaries belong with the above.

1. Every quotation is a provider-reported excerpt from a snapshot retained on 13 November 2026, and I certified none of it against the document body.

2. No National Security Agreement text was read, in either grant.

3. No application form, pending application, modification order or renewal was read.

4. No revocation, withholding or denial proceeding was read, and I make no finding that the §35 powers have been used or have never been used.

5. No count of grants, licensees, pending applications or refusals is asserted.

6. The cable-name divergence inside DA 25-717 is reported as printed and left unresolved.

7. The 2024 CFR edition predates the newer framework, and which track governs a specific application is unresolved here.

8. The three-year service-commencement requirement is attributed to §1.70007 only.

9. No capacity, fibre-pair, length, route-kilometre, price, revenue or market figure is asserted beyond the design-capacity input an application must state.

10. No finding that any named company is or is not a security risk, and no characterisation of any government's conduct.

11. Nothing here describes the physical cable, its owners, its capacity or its commercial terms beyond what a read notice recites.

The licensor's own record is the Federal Communications Commission. The licence file tells you who and for how long. It does not tell you on what terms, and that gap is the instrument.