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

No surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Americans would also be up in arms if most of their traffic was routed through China.

Re:No surprising

[spazdor]

I cannot believe no one has yet mentioned Gilmore's postulate:

The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

The potential for exposure of Internet traffic to US snooping creates a a very powerful regulatory force against a particular class of speech on the Internet. So the Internet follows the above rule, grows away from us, and very soon we're at the edge of the network.

Hopefully we'll bounce back once end-to-end encryption is ubiquitous for all Internet protocols and the whole point is moot. (Which will be pretty soon, thanks to a technological arms race being prosecuted by our reigning copyright regime!)

Incidentally, the recently published BGP flaw suggests that China could be routing our traffic through their servers almost undetectably at any time.

Re:No surprising

[fbjon]

China, Russia and the Islamic countries (all own by Dictaroships) don't really care if they spy, cheat or lie

Not only dictatorships spy, cheat and lie.

Re:No surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

China, Russia and the Islamic countries don't really care if they spy, cheat or lie. They want control and power over all and that includes Americans

Funny, that's how I would characterize the USA.

Re:No surprising

[kdemetter]

Really ? Because , it's how i would characterize the European Union (living there).

Maybe it's a global phenomenon. Every major powerful entity wants more power , and they don't care how they can get it.

Re:No surprising

[orasio]

I was going to mod you down (-1, Naive), but I realized you actually are insightful.
It's insightful to see there are still people thinking like you.
I am from another South American country.
The US (if that is what you mean as "America", awful term to use esp. if you are South American) are not at a disadvantage.
The US has imposed globalization, by economic and military means. It is not at a disadvantage, if their are playing a game which rules they wrote. They had the opportunity not to play, letting others live their own lives.

I also read a lot of DC comics when I was a kid, but I outgrew them. There is not Justice League.
Just because we watch their TV, it doesn't mean they are the good guys, and their enemies are bad.

I, like you, don't like governments spying on people, but I don't like it when the US does it, either. You seem to dislike that countries are ruled by fundamentalist leaders, but that is a concern with the US too. And it's the same case, a fundamentalist nut that says he can speak to Alah/God/Yaveh, but ruling for their personal benefit.

American values are no longer something to be saved, they are over. Their constitution is beautiful, but everything went downhill afterwards, it does not even apply anymore. They even say it doesn't apply for people who are not citizens!! And the rotting didn't come from the outside. The US are the propaganda kings. They won the propaganda wars mostly everywhere, so whatever is wrong woith values right now is because of _their_ strategy, not that of "the enemy".

China is the one facing an uneven fight. And they are losing, luckily.

I'm glad!

[BitterOldGUy]

The complete and utter arrogance of our Government and it's treatment of, not only us, but the rest of the World is starting to bite us in the ass. Not only with our Government's attitude with tapping the internet but also with our perceived superiority in space. We are no longer the leaders in space technology thanks to our Government. Other countries have workarounds to our technology because it was too much of a pain to do business with American firms. All because our Government believes that we have a monopoly on technology and smart people.

See, our paranoia and fear is now hurting our economy. And as a result it's hastening our decline. Maybe this will be a wake up call to the powers that be.

Re:I'm glad!

[MagdJTK]

Your current government, sure -- but much of the rest of the world is currently suffering all sorts of horrors because the past policies of GB. From Africa to the middle east, all these so-called "countries" that are or have been engaged in civil war are so because you guys drew a map that was convenient for you, forced people to get along at the point of 10,000 bayonets while you were there, and then thought it would continue to be so once you left.

Gotta love American logic. Apparently US citizens aren't to blame for their current government's actions, but British citizens are to blame for things that happened before they were born...

The US is still playing junior varsity "nation building" by comparison.

And the other favourite: "Someone did something worse in the past, so we can do whatever we want!"

Free Market

[The Snowman]

This is a free market at its best. The United States provides a poor service (allow us to carry your data, and we will spy on it), so foreign telecomms decide the better value is not to route traffic through the United States. Our own laws that promote spying, snooping, invasion of privacy, and generally going against the spirit of the Constitution (I say spirit because it does not apply to foreign citizens in most cases) will be used against us. Other nations will decide that we are increasingly irrelevant: our dollar is on a trend of weakening against foreign currencies due to the massive trade deficit which in turn puts our balls squarely in the hands of countries such as China. This weakens our clout in international markets. This story is just one facet of the weakening of the United States as a superpower and our downward slide into becoming a third-world country. Our politicians and corporate executives are so concerned about maintaining their wealth that they are willing to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

No, I am not cynical. I am also not sarcastic.

Re:Thanks, washington

[Inglix the Mad]

Well, truth be told, those people in Washington are elected. Perhaps people should look in the mirror and if they've voted for President Bush or anyone, and I mean ANYONE, that has voted for the UN-Patriot Acts I & II, the DMCA, et al., seriously consider educating themselves before voting this time. Of course that won't happen.

Re:Oh hey

[maxume]

The U.S. has about 5% of the worlds population and is separate by large amounts of water from more than 80% of the global population.

Thus, in the long term, it simply doesn't make any sense that the U.S. would be the world's internet hub, so this isn't really evidence of decay or any other silliness, it is just as easily interpreted as global progress.

It doesn't matter

[CaptainTux]

In the long run, I don't think it matters that some countries are routing traffic around the United States. The truth of the matter is simply that the U.S. intelligence agencies will find new ways to get the data by either covertly installing monitoring and capture equipment in the countries of interests or by strong-arming those governments to send traffic our way. Yes, I realize that governments don't centrally control most internet hubs in most countries but you can bet that when money or other aide is at risk, they'll find a way to make it happen.

And other intelligence agencies in other countries

[ducomputergeek]

don't spy on the communications in and out of their countries? The US does not have a monopoly on signals intelligence. This is one of those issues where any country that has any sig int capabilities are using it to monitor the tubes.

Re:Oh hey

[Concerned Onlooker]

The problem is not that the US is not a 'hub' but rather that the US is lately seen as a place that is not a safe place to keep your data (for US citizens as well, actually). It's bad business.

The whole point about the Internet...

[EWAdams]

... is that it's supposed to be redundant and fault-tolerant -- where "fault" includes people trying to sabotage it either physically by cutting wires, or virtually through censorship and spying. The more different routes there are, the better.

Re:Good Riddance

[Doc Ruby]

Of course there are Internet "hubs". I've got several of them right there in my office LAN. But that's different from something being "the" hub.

The Internet is so diverse and capable of so much decentralization that it even includes lots of hubs. But that's different from the majority of the world's traffic going through a single country that isn't at an endpoint. The US being "the world's Internet hub" was a temporary historical artifact, at odds with actual Internet architecture once the Internet was truly global, and not just "the USA's extranet".

You missed the important point.

[Anonymous Coward]

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

True. However, you missed the most important point. Because of "intelligence" agency surveillance in the U.S., commerce in the U.S. is no longer safe. So companies are taking their business elsewhere.

It's not just internet traffic. Software from the U.S. cannot be trusted. All of the U.S. government's many secret departments believe that they can a) order executives of companies that do business in the U.S. to provide any help they want so that they can accomplish surveillance, and b) put the executives in prison if they reveal the corruption. So, any software that has ever been under U.S. control, or has been corrupted by the U.S. government, cannot be trusted.

Often employees of U.S. government secret departments take jobs in commercial companies, and pretend to be normal employees, while serving illegal purposes of the secret departments. So even companies in other countries cannot be trusted to be free of corrupt surveillance, paid for by U.S. taxpayers.

It's not like any of that is a big secret. There are plenty of books and articles about U.S. government surveillance. However, most people in the U.S. just don't want to believe the level of corruption.

Re:You missed the important point.

[zogger]

It works both ways. You don't think, take for example China (although I think it would apply to most foreign nations), that all those students and business people in the US from there don't grab as much tech and data as they can get and transfer it back home?

The bottom line is everyone spies on everyone else. Even so called "allies" spy on each other. Then you have pure outside of government corporate espionage. Then you have "free lance" spies and crackers who find data and sell it to whomever will give them the most for it.

Ha! It's big business, the economy might collapse without it! snicker

Anyway, them foreign folks thinking they will be safer because they host someplace else..uh huh. That's a nice *theory* I guess....The US gets a lot of press because it is a big dog nation, that doesn't mean all these other nations don't try just as hard with the resources and access they have. Their various citizenry may want to *believe* they aren't being spied on, that's about it.

All governments and big corporations go corrupt, just the way it goes, too much power and money to be made.

Not surprising

[symbolset]

The internet is a redundant fault tolerant network. It routes around damage. Censorship is damage. Monitoring is damage. Theft of the commons by rights holders is damage. What did they think was going to happen?

Re:Not surprising

[ravenshrike]

Ironically, the fact that the information never actually hits US-based networks makes it vastly more legal for our intelligence agencies to intercept.

Feels like Fox News in Here

[servognome]

Seems like everybody instantly is attaching their personal political interpretation of the data. The article was about the difficulties intelligence agencies face as traffic shifts, not that the agencies are the primary reason for the shift.
While security of data plays a small role, economics is playing a larger role. FTFA

International networks that carry data into and out of the United States are still being expanded at a sharp rate, but the Internet infrastructure in many other regions of the world is growing even more quickly.

The traffic in and out of the US isn't going down, it's still climbing. As countries develop around the world, it makes economic sense that they would develop their own intraregional connections. China is natrually going to build more tubes to it's developing regional trade partners. You have a situation where there is more global communication being generated elsewhere, which results in a reduction in the % of traffic through the US.

This is less about security policy, and more about the reduced economic reliance on the US.