Imagine the ocean as a giant apartment building: each coastal nation owns the “rooms” nearest its shoreline, called Exclusive Economic Zones, but the endless hallway in the middle — the high seas — belongs to everyone.

In 1982 the United Nations wrote the rules for that “hallway” in a treaty called the Convention on the Law of the Sea. The treaty says all seabed minerals found beyond national waters are the common heritage of mankind, meaning no single country or company can just grab them.

To manage this shared zone, the treaty created the International Seabed Authority (ISA), based in Kingston, Jamaica. Think of the ISA as the building’s management office. Its job is to hand out exploration licences, make sure contractors follow safety and environmental rules, and collect royalties.

Every coastal state on Earth gets a vote in the ISA Assembly, while a smaller Council of 36 countries reviews technical plans and can approve or reject mining applications.

A panel of scientists, the Legal and Technical Commission, checks each project’s impact studies, and an independent inspectorate can board ships to verify that companies follow the rules at sea.

Right now, the ISA has issued more than two dozen exploration licences but has not yet approved full-scale commercial mining.

Delegates are debating a detailed “Mining Code” that will set pollution limits, define how money gets shared, and outline what happens if a company breaks the rules.

Until that code is finished, the deep ocean’s mineral riches remain in a legal waiting room: no one owns them, but no one can mine them either without the ISA’s green light.