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?"

Comments

That e-mail to Brazil would read:

[cowboy junkie]

Hey - is /. down for you too?

Maps of the internet

[kevin805]

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.

Re:Maps of the internet

[iCEBaLM]

I've been studying the maps here, specifically the submarine fibreoptic cable maps. If you look at them and study them you can see that there is enough connectivity already to route around the US completely from any connected point on the globe to another. The reason why most traffic is routed through the US today is because:

1. There are more links to/from the US
2. The links to/from the US are the fastest route
3. The links to/from the US are the shortest route

In a pinch the global internet would survive without the US, it would just get slower.

-- iCEBaLM

But the world revolves around the US

[Wedman]

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?!

Re:But the world revolves around the US

[Swarfega]

For example: If the US was gone, then what would be holding Canada to the planet?

Canada is a Commonwealth state - it doesn't need the US to hold it back :)

Root servers

[Jason W]

The root DNS servers are pretty important. From a quick looksee at my named.ca, I'd say 10/12 are in the US, including 3 at government facilities (.gov and .mil). Of the other 2, one is hosted by RIPE (K) and another in Japan (M).

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.

Routes and the USA

[carlfish]

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...

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 .za.

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
--

CAIDA is a good place for this kind of info

[jelson]

The fine folks down at CAIDA do a nice job of collecting all sorts of statistics about the Internet, partly to answer questions like this one. It's a good place to look for more info.

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):

U.S. networks do seem to dominate global Internet topology -- they provide transit for 71.4% of the total skitter paths that neither originate nor end in the U.S. U.S. networks appear to be especially significant for other countries in the Americas: all traffic to Mexico and 97.8% of traffic to Peru and Chile (SWA) crosses the U.S. on its way. Our sample also shows a large transit role played by U.S. networks for traffic to China-Hong Kong (90.3%), Taiwan (83.5%) and Oceania (77.8% of traffic to Australia and 79.6 of traffic to New Zealand).

[...]

The U.S. is the major Internet transit intermediary for the rest of the world: 71% of traces that neither start nor end in the U.S. still pass through it. In most connections between different countries, the U.S. is the only third party country that also appears in the path.

BTW, never pass up an opportunity to hear kc claffy speak, she's great.

Alternatives would be found ...

[gotan]

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.