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The crisis taught the world’s shipping to go dark. By May, more than two-thirds of non-Iranian transits through Hormuz were switching off AIS, carrying legitimate UAE, Qatari, Kuwaiti, and Iraqi oil through Gulf-of-Oman transfers with transponders off. The dark-fleet tactic, pioneered for sanctions evasion, became a commercial norm for allied oil, and the transparency the market depends on broke in a way that cannot be unseen. A governed strait makes identified transit a condition of passage. This post reads the opacity the vacuum normalized.

On 18 May 2026, Iran formally announced the Persian Gulf Strait Authority, the institutional body administering its toll-booth corridor through the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran has built a chokepoint authority. It is not, on its present design, the configuration the operator class, the United States, China, the GCC, or the site has been arguing for. This post reads the PGSA in detail and identifies the six features that separate it from a treaty-backed authority on the Suez or Panama model.

A fully loaded VLCC through Hormuz today carries six to ten million dollars of incremental cost above the January baseline. War-risk premium, freight uplift, IRGC toll, demurrage, P and I. Not one dollar funds pilotage, escort, or a published rule book. Suez charges an equivalent VLCC eight hundred thousand and includes all of it.