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How Dependent Is The Internet On The U.S.?
interstar asks: "It's been noted before, but Cringely has an interesting article on Carnivore. The final, big thought is that it might give the U.S. security services the possibility to shut down the Internet. Now, as a UK resident, I'm concerned, but it raised another question in my mind. As of today - July 2000 - how dependent are we in the rest of the world on the U.S. Internet? If all nodes under U.S. jurisdiction shutdown tomorrow, could I still route mail to my girlfriend in Brazil, around the smoking crater? Could a company in Paris hire programmers in India and Russia? Do we still need the U.S. or is the global Internet now independent?"
What if instead of just passively dropping off the network, the US nodes started broadcasting null routes? or somesuch other evil thing?
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it would be a lot more boring. For a start, most of the fastest connections in the world are to/from the US, and the backbone infrastructure there is pretty blindingly speedy. I suspect that, with the US taken out of the internet equation, the firm in Paris would have to wait a bit longer for the replies from programmers in India or Russia.
:) Seriously, the US generates most of the traffic too, so maybe it would balance out.
A lot of the content is also based over there, so the WWW would instantly (if we are talking a big Carnivore-style switch-off) lose a heck of a lot of information. Perhaps enough to severely cripple its use as a tool.
On the other hand, it would lose a sizeable percentage of AOL users as well, so the bandwidth for the rest of the world might increase dramatically
In all, I think the worst problem would be the sudden lack of information.
A friend and I were discussing this the other day. Although there's still a lot to discuss about whether or not the actual traffic *would* get routed, another topic that usually comes up is that would the reduced capacity be able to handle all the traffic that the web generates? It's important to remember here that if you lose the nodes in the US, you'd lose all the American users as well, reducing the traffic overall.
Hey - is /. down for you too?
I've heard gripes from various european friends that when they traceroute to neighboring countries they tend to go through the US to get there. Direct routing would be better. Is this still the case? Maybe the patchwork of various telcos should put aside the differences for the good of the net...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Anyone with enough time can probably figure out the answers to you questions by consulting one of the maps at:
http://www.cybergeography.com/atlas/ atlas.html
This map seems to suggest that most data does pass through the US.
I've just forwarded this question to the internet architect, Al Gore, and he has promised to get a response back to me by tomorrow. Seems he's busy wokring on the intergalaticnet at the moment and can't drop what he's doing. Nice guy, that Al.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
Of course the Internet would die. If the United States of America were to disappear tomorrow, the entire world would then cease to exist along with it.
For example: If the US was gone, then what would be holding Canada to the planet? Nothing! Canada would float off into space and crash into the sun. Also, since 89.58% of the worlds heavy metals is has been shipped to the United States, then what would be balancing Europe, Africa and Asia where they are today? Nothing! They would sink to the South Pole, and everybody would freeze to death.
Yup. The Eeee-yooo-nited States of America is the glue that keeps this world spinnin'! Now all youse other nations remember that, y'all hear?!
Certainly, this wouldn't stop you from setting up your own root server, but I'd venture to guess that most ISP's in other countries use the US ones that come with BIND. It might take a few days before they all got switched over.
Kinda OT: You should be using 199.166.24.1 (ns1.vrx.net) as your main DNS server (or setup your named.ca to be a root server). Try it, then visit the.earth or free.tibet.
As far as I can tell, a good deal of the world's traffic is routed in one way or another through the US. Probably most traffic destined for Australia or Latin America passes through the US, either just by the route of the fiber or actually having routers on-shore. If we (the US) wanted to screw the Internet as a whole, I'm sure we could do away with greater than half of the non-US destinations.
You also have to keep in mind that ARIN, based in the US, allocates IPs, both for US-based entities and to overseas folks. Likewise, I'm pretty sure most of the root nameservers are in the US, or at least on this side of the pond. Also, of course, the infrastructure for registering new com/net/org domains would be down until such time as an overseas entity or group took over and started updating the remaining root nameservers, if any, or began to run their own. The real bitch of this, of course, is that just about every resolver in the world is programmed with the current roots in its hints file.
On the other hand, as time goes on there are more and more links being run the other way around the globe. Ones that go through the middle east or Russia, and then on to far Eastern destinations. If this trend continues, of course, the rest of the world will be in a much better situation in case of the US being blackholed for whatever reason. I believe the same sort of trend is beginning for getting links directly to South America, and if that is the case, that would also help immensely. As far as Canada is concerned, there are probably quite a number of trans-Atlantic cables either terminating there already or which run across Newfoundland, and so could, in relatively short order, be used to get Canadian connectivity back to Europe. The big question of course, would be whether the US being gone was because of an internal will, in which case Canada would be unable or more likely unwilling to tap into the US trans-oceanic cables that run across their land, or if the problem was that the US for some reason had a major political breakdown and lost their superpower status, in which case I doubt that they would have much of a problem appropriating needed cables for their own use.
In short, for now, the Internet as a whole would be a less useful place to inhabit if the US was to go away for some reason, but as time goes on, the trend appears to be a less US-centric one. That's not to say that there's not a lot of traffic running through it, but more that later on, more traffic could be routed around it.
-Nathan
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I ran an ISP in Panama for a couple of years a couple of years ago, and at the same time got to know a lot of the infrastructure in most central and south american countries, which represent a good sample of the world when it comes to Internet connectivity. My view on things is that, were the US to suddenly go down in a ball of fire, or if bill gates gets ellected president and gets legistlation passed that would force windows on all ISP servers in the US, most countries would be disconnected from other countries, but local (domestic) traffic would still route. most countries by now have the equivalent of a MAE and route local traffic among themselves (this is not as obvious as it sounds, since there's a TON of pollitical and economical issues to be resovled before you can get this going in most countries) and use US connectivity through satellite and/or fiber for their international traffic. I know there's a lot of intra europe connectivity going on, but would think that most of europe-to-assia traffic would go through the US (please correct me if i'm wrong). The bottom line is that you would still be able to route traffic locally until you can get connectivity to somewhere else that would make a good hubbing place like the UK (specially that island owned by that guy a few miles off their coast). So the bottom line is that we would be partially cut off for like a month, and then back online.
now if you asked me about content, well, that's a different matter. most internet content is hosted in US servers due to the fact that most ISPs can get to the US pretty fast and interconnection among US ISPs is excellent compared to the rest of the world. In the case of the ball of fire, we would have to hire that guy that's trying to save the history of the internet. If it's the case of bill gates getting elected, then nothing could ever be done, and all connectivity, caching systems and redundant links would be saturated forever due to direct email marketing campagins from microsoft using the database they've collected for years in secret using the task scheduler and registration forms.
the internet is here to stay.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
Firstly, there's a big difference between what Cringeley suggests (the ability to shut down ISPs) and shutting down all the backbones. Taking down all the ISPs in the USA, but leaving the backbones running would make the net several orders of magnitude faster for the rest of us. (and several orders of magnitude more boring) However, if the backbones were taken down...
.za.
Living in Sydney Australia, pretty much all of my routes go through the USA, except those to very close neighbours such as Malaysia and Indonesia. My routes to Japan and Taiwan go via the USA. South Africa is closer to Perth, Australia than I am. My packets to South Africa go to Perth, THEN to the US, THEN to
Sometimes it's even worse than that. Back when I was at University, it was so bad that when I did a traceroute between two servers 15 minutes drive apart but on different backbones, the packets were going via California.
There are links between countries that could be used if the USA were to vanish, but these links are usually significantly underpowered. Most of the major content providers are in the USA, most of the packets go to and from the USA, so other countries tend to invest most of their money in fat pipes to North America. And since those fat pipes are already there, they may as well take care of some of the local traffic as well.
Between countries on the same continent, you're probably looking at a continuing stable network. But inter-continental links would most likely fall over and die.
Even if the underpowered inter-continental links could take it, you'd see a routing nightmare. BGP packets would be flying around in circles panicking, and any sane network administrator would lock him or herself in a small room and whimper until it was all over.
There's also other things to think of. How many of the root nameservers are outside the USA? How much traffic can they take? How would they cope with the prolonged absence of a.root-servers?
Charles Miller
--
The more I learn about the Internet, the more amazed I am that it works at all.
As for Carnivore, the idea of a co-located snoop box seems reasonable enough technically. (Legally and politically is another matter entirely.) As a means of shutting down the Internet, it doesn't make sense.
We need much tighter legal controls on such snooping. The FBI has been fighting this in the telephony area, where the phone industry has insisted that CALEA only authorizes the FBI to wiretap with telco assistance after the telco receives a court order. Law enforcement doesn't get to select what they want to listen to by themselves; the telco has to physically set that up. The FCC has gone along with the telco industry's position that the telco must check the validity of the court order and keep records on the taps; some vague piece of paper from the FBI isn't enough.
Carnivore needs at least that level of protection. Preferably more.
For example, in their paper Measurements of Internet topology in the Asia-Pacific Region, they focus part of their study on which countries provide IP transit for other countries. In other words, they want to know how often certain countries carry traffic that is neither sourced nor destined for that country. They conclude, in part (see Sections 4 and 5):
BTW, never pass up an opportunity to hear kc claffy speak, she's great.I'd like to turn the question around.
If the EU (or say.. Asia) suddenly decided to shut down all nodes of the Internet in their area, would the US companies get their emails to the coders in India? Would they get their emails through to Paris? Why is it that so many Americans cannot think of the world in anything but a US centric way?
I live in Finland but am currently in Singapore, coding the back end for the site of a dot-com startup. You would be amazed how little thought the USA gets here in the daily life. I doubt that many people (normal citizens) would even notice / care if the USA dropped off the Internet. Sure some stock brokers would suffer from lack of fast & good information about Wall Street but in the end of the day, there would be no catastrophy.
Doing a traceroute on servers in Finland, I see that the traffic is currently being routed through the USA (up to 30 hops to many sites!) so I'm gussing I would have a hard time reaching some Finnish servers.. However, I dial up to my Finnish ISP using my GSM cellular phone and a Palm IIIx daily anyway, so I could still get my email and access Finnish sites.. No prob..
The USA is not the beginning, center nor end of the world.
Umm, it is a bit outdated :).
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
...with the exceptions of those to my ISP to figure out why my proxy was messed up, have gone through servers in Vienna, Virginia, or somewhere within a 20 mile radius of it. I've tried this with several ISPs, and it happens even when connecting to my friend 3 blocks away. Of course, I live in Virginia. Still, I remember our idiot governor once bragging about how 90% of all the world's internet traffic goes through Virginia. As dumb as he may be on policy, I think he's got that statistic right. It's only a two-hour drive to the grand hub of the internet, and we have some really crazy people around here. Think, foreigners, do you want YOUR connections dependent on systems within a stone's throw of the lunatics inside the D.C. beltway?
The name "world wide web" applies to how the content is linked, not the configuration of the land lines. We have an "all roads lead to Rome" situation, and our cross-paths are few and far between.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Ok... This entire discussion about cutting out the US might be a bit academic. I'll grant You that the US might hold more nodes than any other COUNTRY in the world, but certainly no more nodes than the rest of the world put together.
As pertaining to Your "maps". Please bear this in mind. I've NEVER seen a US citizen (netizien or "real") who actually believed that the US was not the hub of the world, and as such did not base their concept of ANYHTING on the US. If You REALLY want to know if the world can survive without the US on the internet, don't look at the traffic generated BY the US. Look at the traffic routed THROUGH the US. Take a small country like... Say Portugal, and look at how much traffic they send THROUGH the US, not counting traffic that ends there (that would be senseless if the node was cut away). Also ask Yourself this: Would Portugal have alternate routes in place ?
I'm sure that some minor countries might largely depend on bigger countries to sustain their internet access and routing information. And certainly if this pathway was lost, a lot of "damage" (logically, not phisically) would be done. Sure the routerinfo might even take a long while to recover. BUT I seriously doubt that most of us (even those of us working in the ISP business) ofhand can think of a single coutry or larger area that is wholly dependend on another (single point of failure). This is actually the POINT of the internet. Even though You might cut away pieces, the ramins should still work. I'm not saying that there are not stupid poeple out there who just say to themselves: "We'll just depend on someone else to make sure this works". But they are also the ones who get the virus in the office, they are also the ones stuck in traffic and generally the ones who are dumb enough not to think for themselves. To plan for the future.
Up untill a few years ago it was actually fairly common for us in Denmark to "loose" the connection to the US, and what came of that You might ask ? Absolutely nothing. The internet worked just fine. Only the US sites were responding DAMNED slow as we had to route the other way around the world to get to them. So in essence: These maps are bogus, and provides no real insight into the US's "central role" in the internet.
cut away the spider, and the web will still be there....
--- To err is human... Am I more human than most ?
What would probably happen is, that
a) big parts of the net would be missing
b) maybe some countries/continents become either isolated or are badly (small bandwith) connected to the rest of the world
but this is very shortterm, after a few days/weeks alternative lines would be found, (phonelines etc.) and bandwith previously routed via USA would be routed elsewhere, and future projects for transatlantic lines are more likely to avoid USA.
The reason is, that the internet is a driving factor for too many countries economies by now, it's no longer the toy of some university geeks. If the net fails bigscale because the FBI wants to flex it's muscles this will be taken into account in the future, measures will be taken to reduce the dependency of the internet on the USA backbones.
The FBI knows this too, and even if their Carnivore toys have some builtin facility to shut down the whole trafic this will be used very carefully, and probably not nationwide. But theres a different aspect: Carnivore could be used to work selectively this makes a lot of sense: shut down that annoying website at ISP level with a commandline, put pressure on an ISP by just threatening to shut down it's services, put diplomatic pressure on other countries (one at a time) threatening to isolate their part of the internet (at least what is routed through US), simply drop any packets encrypted in a way the FBI doesn't like. The thing is, that Carnivore works as the big Hammer (shut down the net) only once, but much better and more effectively as a scalpel, to push some policies and generally make the internet behave the way the FBI wants it to.
The best thing that could happen to the internet is that some cracker found out now, how to shut down these boxes and do it to the 20 or so that are already in place, then the project would die pretty fast after some very bad publicity for the FBI.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
*duck*
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-- Slashdot sucks.
Just post a story about a web page residing on each one of them in a short time frame and let the /. effect do the rest...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?