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Comment by glitchc | Hacker News Reader

Huh? Are you kidding? Each cable bundle can transmit petabytes of data per second. Think of all the Netflix movies being watched in Japan and Australia transmitted over that cable. Why would anyone encrypt that? Furthermore, the hardware required to encrypt, even if feasible (and that’s unclear), would be astronomical in cost.

Plus, it’s not just about access. A malicious actor could always damage or destroy the cable, cutting off a primary channel of communications.

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That's a lousy example because Netflix movies are definitely encrypted.

They're also almost always served via a local CDN node. A million Australians watching the latest Game of Thrones episodes probably means a couple dozen transfers of that file across the Pacific, not a million.

If you're an ISP, Netflix will even send you (free!) servers for this. https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

> If you're an ISP, Netflix will even send you (free!) servers for this.

  startyourownisp.com

I think this might be a bit much for getting some freebies. It would be fun, though. Unfortunately, it would take me a lot of work in the place I'm at for this to make any sense at all.

You’d have to prove that it’d be beneficial bandwidth wise, which seems unlikely.

Setting up an asymmetrical encryption channel can be hard (and expensive). But once it's set up it moves to a cheaper faster symmetrical encryption which rotates the keys. There are dedicated chips for this encryption that it barely takes any processing power at all.

Also note that would be the backbone encryption channels, but inside those people would be using https which is encryption further up the networking stack.

It's encrypted turtles all the way down.

"Encryption is so expensive!" cries the 1990s

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