From the very first subsea telegraph cables laid in the second half of the 19th century, subsea cables were owned by private companies with concessions for landing licenses in foreign countries. After the recognition of sovereign power over telecommunications, subsea telephone cables were laid in the form of joint efforts of monopolies of each country in the 1950s and ʼ60s. This was the beginning of “cable consortia”. Around the year 2000, in the middle of the “cable bubble,” “private cables” emerged while consortia with a very large number of participants were formed. After the bubble burst, an attempt was made to form consortia with fewer participants to achieve faster decision making. However, the question remains as to why cable owners still try to form consortia even though some of them have enough monetary funds and engineering expertise. This paper argues that current cable owners seek to lay both privately owned cables and consortium cables to make their network most resilient.

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With a view to exploring public policy that promotes consumers’ adoption of digital services while respecting privacy, we conducted two analyses on adoption behaviors and perceived privacy risk (PPR) respectively, regarding four digital services: “My number card” (an identity card issued by the government), the Japanese COVID-19 contact tracing app “COCOA”, smart speaker (SS) and the popular SNS “LINE”. Datasets had approximately 1400 to 2400 samples, collected by an online survey for telecommunications users in Japan. 　
The analysis of adoption behavior revealed significant relationship between PPR measured by subjective probability, perceived usefulness, subjective diffusion rate and positiveness toward new digital products, and adoption probability. PPR had a potential impact to change adoption probability from six to a maximum of ten percentage points. 　
The analysis of PPR revealed that trust in online business and privacy legislation and perception of higher frequency of news reports on data leakage were related with decrease of PPR for the services other than SS, while experience of online trouble was related with PPR’s decrease for SS. Advanced consumer literacy was also related to PPR’s decrease for the all services. 　
Increased trust and literacy, decreased risk perception and enhanced adoption can be possible by releasing “negative” information on troubles to the public, which should be accompanied by information on policy responses and prevention measures of similar breaches.

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