US No Longer the World's Internet Hub

museumpeace brings us a New York Times story about how internet traffic is increasingly flowing around the US as web-based industries catch up in other parts of the world. Other issues, such as the Patriot Act, have made foreign companies wary about having their data on US servers. From the NYTimes: "Internet industry executives and government officials have acknowledged that Internet traffic passing through the switching equipment of companies based in the United States has proved a distinct advantage for American intelligence agencies. In December 2005, The New York Times reported that the National Security Agency had established a program with the cooperation of American telecommunications firms that included the interception of foreign Internet communications. Some Internet technologists and privacy advocates say those actions and other government policies may be hastening the shift in Canadian and European traffic away from the United States."

Comments

Re:Good Riddance

[phoenixwade]

The Earth has a center, because it is a sphere. But no one lives outside a small band +/- 400m from the surface, so "the world" is a shell that has no center.

No one except the Mole Men, and they've got their own Internet. Which is really more an "Infranet", but that's their problem.

There are large population centers more than 400m above sealevel (more than twice that, actually). Plus there are people in the dead sea which is 420 meters below sea level.

And that's before we start counting the people living on the ISS, the people living in the salt mine city, Atlantians (Deeper or Higher than 400m depending on who you talk to) or the mole men.....

SOX probably more influential than Patriot Act

[ObiWonKanblomi]

Other issues, such as the Patriot Act, have made foreign companies wary about having their data on US servers.

No. Other forces such as wanting increase profit margins are probably having a bigger influence.

WRT legislation, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has probably had a greater impact on influencing companies on their move. Provisions within S-OX require companies to provide access to data to allow for full data audits. That would include emails, internal reports, etc.

Re:Logical conclusion of this

[pieterh]

If the servers are already accessed via strong encryption the location is not very relevant unless the jurisdiction bans such encryption. The main danger to such communities is then the seizure of their equipment by local authorities, on the basis of one or other real or imagined infraction (child pornography, terrorism, patent infringement, copyright infringement, hate crimes, etc.)

I'm not sure Europe is better than the USA in terms of freedom from such seizures. There are surely better locations.

Cloud computing... is a buzzword but is interesting nonetheless. Over time we may see secure or private clouds, which would then correspond to these islands, and which might become fully independent of vulnerable physical servers.

So we may have a future of virtualized, distributed, secure islands connected by a sea of insecurity.

But then again, it's late on a hot Saturday afternnon here in Brussels and it's beer o'clock. :-)

Re:I'm glad!

[jez9999]

And in the UK the government have mandated that much of your data is stored by ISPs via the braindead RIP act, and some other act demands that you hand over decryption keys or be in breach of the law. Hey, not much better.

Re:Good Riddance

[Lonewolf666]

The Internet isn't supposed to have a "hub". It's supposed to be completely distributed and decentralized.

I guess there is a good deal of cost-cutting and laziness involved in not having more independent connections. Most German providers, for instance, route their traffic through the DE-CIX node in Frankfurt instead of maintaining a dozen peer links.

This said, at some point it must be cheaper to have direct connections than buying capacity on a detour over the US. Especially where overseas cable are involved. A Google search brought up the following maps for the IPV6 net, and it seems that the countries outside the US do indeed build their own connections:
ahref=http://ipv6.nlsde.buaa.edu.cn/rel=url2html-19746http://ipv6.nlsde.buaa.edu.cn/>