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Saudi stc Launches Vision Submarine Cable in Red Sea

The Saudi Vision Cable, inspired by Vision 2030, is wholly owned by stc Group and spans over a distance of 1.1 million meters. (Asharq Al-Awsat)
The Saudi Vision Cable, inspired by Vision 2030, is wholly owned by stc Group and spans over a distance of 1.1 million meters. (Asharq Al-Awsat)
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Saudi stc Launches Vision Submarine Cable in Red Sea

The Saudi Vision Cable, inspired by Vision 2030, is wholly owned by stc Group and spans over a distance of 1.1 million meters. (Asharq Al-Awsat)
The Saudi Vision Cable, inspired by Vision 2030, is wholly owned by stc Group and spans over a distance of 1.1 million meters. (Asharq Al-Awsat)

Saudi telecommunication company stc Group launched the "Saudi Vision Cable," the first high-speed cable in the Red Sea, through its first landing station in Jeddah.

The Governor of the Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC), Mohammed al-Tamimi, attended the launch ceremony.

The Saudi Vision Cable, inspired by Vision 2030, is wholly owned by stc Group and spans over a distance of 1.1 million meters.

The new cable will provide connectivity up to 18 Terabytes per second/fiber pair with 16 fiber pairs through four landings in Jeddah, Yanbu, Duba, and Haql.

Group CEO Olayan al-Wetaid explained that this achievement reveals the company's leadership in providing advanced maritime and international telecommunications services.

Wetaid indicated that it reflects "our comprehensive strategy that aims to diversify the Group's investment opportunities and support digital transformation in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia by boosting the digital infrastructure."

He explained that the cable would provide digital connectivity services for corporates and individuals between Saudi Arabia and the world by building a regional digital hub connecting the continents and helping meet the needs of companies and customers via an integrated digital ecosystem.

Saudi Vision Cable provides communication between several international information centers.

"It also achieves the raising level of the unified optical fiber platform that is cost-efficient and flexible, and provides access low latency - to all international cables in the landing stations and information centers of the stc Group," he added.

The new cable will be one of the submarine cables that will be linked to the MENA Hub connecting three continents of the globe, leveraging the strategic location of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It will help to enhance investment in international communication services and data centers.

It will join the 16 cables invested by stc Group between the east and the west of the Kingdom and provide more reliable internet service to meet the increasing demand for communications and internet at the local and international levels.

It will also allow all of the country's sectors to obtain high-speed internet services, including education, healthcare, and business which will, in general, provide economic and social benefits.

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Trump Expected to Shift Course on Antitrust, Stop Google Breakup

The Google logo is seen on the Google house at CES 2024, an annual consumer electronics trade show, in Las Vegas, Nevada, US, January 10, 2024. (Reuters)
The Google logo is seen on the Google house at CES 2024, an annual consumer electronics trade show, in Las Vegas, Nevada, US, January 10, 2024. (Reuters)
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Trump Expected to Shift Course on Antitrust, Stop Google Breakup

The Google logo is seen on the Google house at CES 2024, an annual consumer electronics trade show, in Las Vegas, Nevada, US, January 10, 2024. (Reuters)
The Google logo is seen on the Google house at CES 2024, an annual consumer electronics trade show, in Las Vegas, Nevada, US, January 10, 2024. (Reuters)

Donald Trump will likely dial back some of the antitrust policies pursued under the administration of President Joe Biden, potentially including a bid to break up Alphabet's Google over its dominance in online search, experts said.

Trump is expected to continue cases against Big Tech, several of which began in his first term, but his recent skepticism about a potential Google breakup highlights the power he will hold over how those cases are run.

"If you do that, are you going to destroy the company? What you can do without breaking it up is make sure it's more fair," he said at an event in Chicago in October, Reuters reported.

The US Department of Justice is currently pursuing two antimonopoly cases against Google - one over search and another over advertising technology, as well as a case against Apple . The US Federal Trade Commission is suing Meta Platforms and Amazon.com.

The DOJ has laid out a range of potential remedies in the search case, including making Google divest parts of its business such as the Chrome Web browser and ending agreements that make it the default search engine on devices like Apple's iPhone.

But the trial over those fixes will not happen until April 2025, with a final ruling likely in August. That gives Trump and the DOJ time to change course if they choose, said William Kovacic, a law professor at George Washington University.

"He is certainly in the position to control the DOJ's disposition of the remedies phase," said Kovacic, who chaired the Federal Trade Commission under then-president George W. Bush.

Trump is also likely to pull back on some policies that have irritated dealmakers under the Biden administration, attorneys said. One is a reluctance to settle with merging companies, which was previously common and let companies address competition problems that agencies raised about deals by taking actions like selling part of the business.

The FTC and DOJ would likely scrap merger review guidelines crafted under Biden, said Jon Dubrow, a partner at law firm McDermott Will & Emery.

"The 2023 merger guidelines were very hostile to mergers and acquisitions," he said, echoing a view widely held on Wall Street.

The FTC's ban on most noncompete clauses in employer-employee contracts could be more vulnerable to a lawsuit brought by the US Chamber of Commerce, if the FTC votes not to defend it.

About 30 million people, or 20% of US workers, have signed noncompetes, according to the FTC. The agency is currently appealing a court ruling that blocked the rule.

But such actions to dismantle the work of FTC Chair Lina Khan will depend on a Trump-appointed replacement being confirmed to give the bipartisan five-member commission a Republican majority.

Khan's initiatives focused on what she saw as societal harms caused by unchecked corporate consolidation, drawing praise from both Democrats and some Republicans, including Vice President-elect JD Vance. But some in the business and legal communities have criticized her approach as too aggressive.

Trump is not expected to drastically curtail antitrust enforcement, however. A similar number of merger cases was brought under his first term as during the first two years of the Biden administration, according to an analysis by the Sheppard Mullin law firm.