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

Good Riddance

[Doc Ruby]

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

Besides, why should the US carry all the rest of the world's traffic? The world is a globe, which doesn't have a center. Why should Europe / East Asia connections pass through the US? Let them build their share of the interconnects. They've got way more people, and we need all our bandwidth for ourselves, just like anyone else.

The US invented the Internet. We should be exporting equipment and expertise, so the rest of the world can do business with us (and with each other our way), and get paid right to do it.

Re:Good Riddance

[YeeHaW_Jelte]

Might be, but still there are bound to be hubs, peer points, data exchanges in places where traffic is centralized, e.g. at points where transcontinental cables go through the sea, etc.

I think the protocol is decentralized, but the fysical connections cannot be.

You can hardly connect each and every computer on the globe directly, can you?

I know, for example, that one of the longest or maybe the longest direct connection goes from somewhere in Germany straight through to Japan, some 40.000 kilometres.

Thanks, washington

[merreborn]

Thanks, Washington. Between the patriot act and the DMCA, you've managed to legislate one of the few booming industries we had out of the country.

Used to be, there were four things we did better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode
high-speed pizza delivery

You're really trying to cross things off that list as fast as you can, aren't you?

general trend

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only is the data traffic going around the USA, the flow of passengers in airplanes should also follow that trend because of those interesting "hand over the laptop" policies.

It seems ironic to me that the USA government is moving towards a more controlled (shall we say police state?) environment while focusing everyone's attention on other countries (i.e. China) while claiming that those guys are in fact way worse in terms of privacy issues.

Re:Logical conclusion of this

[Joebert]

Someone left a few Yahoo Internet Life Mags from 1998 on my chair yesterday. There was a predictions for 1998 section in the January issue with some similar thoughts.

Penn Jillette (Penn and Teller), 1998

We will continue to be told that freedom is a bad idea. The Net will be blamed for more kiddie porn, terrorism, and loss of privacy. those who remember that these things predate home computers (and maybe even pong) will get blue in the face to keep the future getting better.

Emmanuel goldstien (Publisher of 2600 magazine), 1998

The net will continue to grow, and so will the conflicts -- 12 year olds will battle multi-national corporations, Net Nazis will fight hackers, Governments will have it out with activists. For a time, the wide-open environment of the net will force opposing sides to listen to each-other. Once they all get tired of that, the Net will factionize and break apart so that, similar to TV, we never have to deal with things that disturb us or make us think too much. we'll have the Military Net, the childrens Net, the black net, the white Net, and so on. the days where we actually had to listen to our enemies will become a memory, and finally a myth.

Re:Just a marketing problem

[elynnia]

Back in 1993, John Gilmore famously quoted that:
"The 'net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

And fifteen years later, we're seeing it in action. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Aly.

Excellent post !

[golodh]

This particular issue had slipped my mind, but the parent post and the article cited there bring it back into focus.

US export regulations have a way of being over-broad, just for the ease of legislating. As the Rather than protecting one or two key components, the export regulations tend to protect an entire assembly.

To quote from the article referenced by the parent post (http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11965352): "IN THE spring of 2006 Robert Bigelow needed to take a stand on a trip to Russia to keep a satellite off the floor. The stand was made of aluminium. It had a circular base and legs. It was, says the entrepreneur and head of Bigelow Aerospace in Nevada, "indistinguishable from a common coffee table". Nonetheless, the American authorities told Mr Bigelow that this coffee table was part of a satellite assembly and so counted as a munition. During the trip it would have to be guarded by two security officers at all times."

If that sounds a bit off-center, then perhaps I might add a personal anecdote. In the 1980's I corresponded with someone in a Dutch consultancy. Their company had just won a contract from some Dutch ministry to move a lot of data and Fortran software from a mainframe to a PC environment. They had figured to dump the lot on tape, get the tape to their offices, and then read the tape using a 9-track tape drive connected to a PC on their LAN, recompile the Fortran code on PC, and process the data on PC.

They had (accurately) budgeted for the purchase of a 9-track tape drive and needed one in a hurry. I was asked for a name of good a US manufacturer (they didn't even consider any other source) of 9-track tapes, which I found in 10 minutes and gave to them. So far so good.

That's when the trouble started.

They were careful people and actually phoned the US embassy in The Netherlands to see if they could just order that tape drive, and what the import/export formalities would be. It's well that they did, because, yes, there were some difficulties. Just the formality of an export license. Asked how to obtain one, the embassy responded that not they, but the manufacturer would have to get the license. And that it would take anywhere between 3-4 months to process the paperwork.

Yes, that's right. In order to export a 9-track tape drive to The Netherlands in the nineteen eighties (NATO partner and all) there would be a 3-4 month wait while the paperwork cleared!

Well ... that wasn't an option for them, since the deadline on their contract was only 6 months away. So they went and bought another make. I believe it was Japanese. Or French. Which was duly bought and installed in their offices two weeks later. They successfully completed the move too and delighted the ministry they were working for by much quicker turnaround times (on high-end PCs; the software being CPU-bound) at a fraction of the cost they would incur on the mainframe.

But in the mean time the US Inc. lost an order for a rather ordinary and fairly innocuous 9-track tape drive, which could be second-sourced on the open market within a week or so, while starting off as the *only* name on the shortlist. And all because of some well-intentioned but rather inept export regulations.

Just A thought.

[arthurpaliden]

What if the rest of the world bypassed and then disconnected the United States from the Internet.

Re:They think the same things China thinks.

[symbolset]

It's not ruin. It's opportunity. Lots of market for free and open bandwidth, and lots of jurisdictions who don't care how you kibble your bits. Offshore hosting looks like a chance for the banana republics to build their online economies. It will happen there as well as here, not instead, so everybody benefits.