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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."
Americans would also be up in arms if most of their traffic was routed through China.
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.
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He, who would rather be helping Russian or Chinese agencies, really ought to sleep in the bed they are making for themselves...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Other countries wouldn't have a problem with routing their traffic through the United States if we had good public relations...
"For every packet your country sends through the U.S., you will automatically be entered in a drawing for one of your citizens to win an all-expenses paid trip to exotic, sunny Cuba!"
That would get them excited!
I'm a big tall mofo.
to stop this harmful globalization of our internet. i mean, its america where the tubes are and it needs to stay that way. globalization of the internet harms our way of life, and the future of our children.
why, just last week a boy in arkansas was forced to GeoIP his way to a foreign server so he could has cheezburger. what next? rich icons like goatse and the fat lightsaber guy? but only in that weird numa numa language? the mustard man hosted in russia?
Good people go to bed earlier.
good
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.
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?
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.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
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.
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.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Welcome to America, the Land of the Free! Err.. scratch that.. Welcome to America.
You just got troll'd!
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.
Anthony Papillion
Advanced Data Concepts, Inc.
"Quality Custom Software and IT Services"
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.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
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.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Thank God!
Man, 1999 came and went and it's still way funny!
(In other words, no, it's not funny anymore, and provably false.)
Every time the U.S. acts to abuse its position of relevance in the world, the world will take steps to make the U.S. less relevant. The U.S. has had major controls over the communications across the world and that is changing. The U.S. has major controls and influence over the price and flow of oil in the world and that too is changing with China buying up major influence in the middle east and in Africa. The banking systems are controlled by some elite individuals that even the U.S. cannot claim 'ownership' of but it won't be long before even those entities are displaced as they abuse the governments and citizens of the world.
The thing about the Patriot Act is (theoretically at least), the US government needed it to give them permission to do certain things. In a lot (most?) of countries such an act would be unnecessary because the government already feels free to do whatever it wants. Does anyone actually think China, or Russia, or the UK won't be doing the same thing, just not as openly? I mean, you could maybe make an argument that some of the more enlightened Scandinavian countries may be trusted to put human rights above paranoia, but it's a very small group.
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.
I piss off bigots.
How about we have an international network that is completely free from politics and that politicians can't touch?
The internet is supposed to be global, so having the traffic spread out is a good idea anyway. I'm all for having major "hubs" all across the world. Of course US would go "big brother" on the data that flows through it, not surprised. I'm pretty sure other countries do the same, but it's not advertised. Unless you have something to hide, who cares? Right? :)
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. :-)
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They don't have laws against it that the break in order to do it. It's the lack of order that causes problems. The USA claimes to be rule-driven, but then breaks its own rules. Other countries, like China are easier to operate in. They have no real rules, and if you fall on the wrong side of one, you pay someone off and everything is ok. The US has some twisted concerns about bribery (it's legal if you call it a "contribution" but not if you fail to report it, and we outlaw a non-US citizen bribing someone in a foreign country as a regular necessary part of operating in that country). So we just don't get it sometimes. But even China can be easier to operate aa business in than the USA.
Learn to love Alaska
"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.
I don't disagree with that, but the fact remains that companies are generally going to store their data where they choose to do business (because doing so only exposes them one set of regulations, and because that set of regulations is increasingly likely to include rules about exporting data), so it shouldn't surprise anyone when the rest of the world, which is a lot larger than the U.S., generates, transmits and stores more data than the U.S. does.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
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?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Just like the STUPID encryption export laws a few years ago, that prevented U.S. companies from competing internationally, and did not slow down foreign research one whit.
We MUST get our government to KNOCK OFF THE BULLSHIT, because it is hurting us a great deal. Both in domestic freedom, and in our opportunities to compete internationally.
Way to piss away our competitive advantage. Maybe if we stop the 2-party system I might actually still have a job in 30 years. Doubtful that will happen though.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
What if the rest of the world bypassed and then disconnected the United States from the Internet.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Does anyone else here think this has more to do with the fact that the US isn't the center of the technological world any more? Earth is a big, big place and the United States is a small part of it, why should we expect to be the Internet's hub in any case? Isn't it a lot more plausible that routes that don't go through the US are preferred because they're better?
You gotta find first gear in your giant robot car
This might spoil the tin foil hat party but all these changes are almost certainly due to market forces and the growing ubiquity of network hardware and services getting much cheaper after the 2000 bubble hit and companies were forced to reduce prices and cut back on pie in the sky stuff and concentrate on basic network service. The article bandwidth plot showed the decreasing trend in bandwidth started in 1999-2000 before 9/11 and the Patriot Act. Plus as developing nations build up their networks, they're going to go the cheaper route, they don't have to go to the US anymore because this hardware is all a commodity now. It's cheaper to reduce unnecessary connections and keep your services closer, if Egypt wants a international connection they can get less latency by going to Europe than the US, ten years back there wasn't a choice.
If I am a secret service, my job is to supply infomration by eavesdropping - also on the Internet. I may build something like ECHELON, tapping both sattelite communication and cables both at land and the sea. But if I am clever, I ask the market leaders of routers to include a tiny little piece of code in their products, which nobody will notice. This little code will be a trojan-boot-loader (TBL). It will listen to certain commands embedded in traffic, preferably in search engine queries adn answers as there it will be difficult to detect. And if I know the serial number of the device and the company which purchased it, I have a nice means of industrial espionage. So in any net which is connected to the Internet I will have my information provider. If I am a government or a company which has competitors in the US, UK or NZ I would not buy a router - I would use a Linux based one with the software compiled by myself!
Because the US had the most developed infrastructure countries and corporation obtained their connections from there, the biggest web hosts were there so traffic had to go through the US, now internet traffic outside the US has grown to an extent that justifies creating exchanges and dedicated lines between European and Asian isp's. There is no need to route traffic through the US as there was 10 years ago.
Here's an example of why it's bad for the US:
In a previous company I worked for, based in Canada, an auditor noticed that we were using an offsite backup system based out of the US (a big one, you'd know it if I typed, it but since none of this is their fault, they'll remain anonymous) and informed us that we may be violating Canadian law in sending our traffic into the US given the Patriot act and similar moves by US lawmakers.
So we took our (fairly lucrative) offsite backup contract and rolled our own solution based at a Canadian data center.
The transition sucked, and we probably wouldn't have bothered if the auditor bring it up, but the end result was that a few dollars got removed from the US GDP and added to the Canadian one. Now that's one case, there are undoubtedly more. I would not at this point recommend to an employer that we should make use of any service that requires our data to land in the US.
What does this mean? Most 'Cloud' services that are US based will be given a pass. Even if they have Canadian storage facilities, the keys are still owned by a US firm and subject to the Patriot act.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Nobody's mentioned "FOIP" yet. The "Freedom of Information and Privacy" Act in Canada is both an FOI act when it comes to forcing the government (and some private companies) to reveal all non-classified information upon request, and a privacy-enforcement act that requires government and private business alike to safeguard any personal information for which they are custodian.
I work for a municipal government in Canada, and I have explicitly heard, from IT management in meetings, that we cannot give any contracts for data entry, data storage, data reduction and analysis, etc, to American firms, since the Patriot Act. This only applies to data classified a "private" under the FOIP rules, but here's the rub: the really simple way to handle some large data sets is to just duplicate the whole thing, all the tables. Going over them all to determine the FOIP status of every column and carefully remove, say, any column for "phone number" of your own staff or your customers, is a pain.
What's not a pain is going to a Canadian firm, having them sign a boilerplate FOIP-compliant privacy protection agreement. Various other countries with privacy legislation can be dealt with as well. Americans, alas, must hand over any and all data that the justice system asks for under the Patriot Act, so we can't give them the work.
I haven't heard of us going so far as to avoid transmission of FOIP-covered data through any network that will go through the USA, but after the FISA bill, I would say it's merely a matter of time.
Traffic analysis without cracking crypto is a huge and valuable source of intelligence. Knowing who's talking to whom is something spies really want to know, and it's something the people talking would often hate to have revealed. For a small-scale, down to earth example, look at the HP pretexting scandal.
It does not do that on its own and history has shown more than once that routing around damage takes a while.
Let the PC get its zen on, for chrissake!
I woder why:
No company wants to have to deal with:
1) The Patriot Act
2) Ass-rape happy ISPs
3) ADA laws
4) Liability
5) And those slimy bastard who think they should have every right to snoop through our private business and keep the rest of us out of theirs
Jesus Christ! Does it really take a genius to realize that brainless legislators and greedy proviser have cost us in the U.S. *ANOTHER* #1 spot?!?!?!
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
You're right except for "why the Internet was started". What you cited is a myth. The Internet was started as simply a way for a handful of nuke weapons labs to ship around data without literally sending around packages of punchcard decks. So they connected them by wires. The decentralized architecture came because no single center had organized a project (or its government budget) to "run the network". They got basic TCP/IP running, then email on it, then started building local network apps, which they discussed on the network in "Request for Comment" messages which spec'ed the new app/protocol. Like good scientists, they repeated each other's experiments, and apps/protocols spread. And new sites started using the TCP/IP protocol and the app protocols that ran on it as scientists and engineers found out about how easily they could share data (and email, always the killer app). The fact that the decentralized architecture could also withstand nuke hits once the network was complex enough to have multiple routing choices around any outage (like if some researcher turned off their computer while on vacation) was an unplanned benefit.
But it makes a nice, illustrative myth. However, the real reason is much more illustrative of why the architecture is superior.
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make install -not war
Wrong kind of offshore hosting. A "host" is a PC or reasonable simulation thereof. If you lease an offshore host, you can remote to it through SSL using various tools, and use it for things you would ordinarily use the PC on your desk for. Except that since it's in a different jurisdiction, different rules apply. And there's no chance your significant other, kids, or the prying eyes of your local law enforcement will ever come across it without your explicit permission and consent. As long as you don't violate the local rules where the server is, auto-remember your access code or save stuff to your local machine, you're fine.
You have no control over what FEMA, BATF, RIAA or Homeland Security will make illegal retroactively. You can't control what extraneous websites might be preloaded by your browser, nor if you're using Windows, what content is served by your local rootkit. You don't know what they're monitoring, but the safe money is on "everything". 1984 is here. What you can do is avoid exposure to these risks by running a less "malware friendly OS" to connect to your host in a less tyrannical jurisdiction. It may be informative here to point out that members of the judiciary, Congress, and the executive branch of our government never use a computer directly for their own sake. It's too risky. They have digests of their important email read to them over the phone for denyability purposes, and even then the readers are carefully trained to avoid controversial issues and truly important information is passed person-to-person just like Al-Quaida. It's a wonder they can even grasp what the Internet is often enough to fund their share of it.
You can, but don't have to, also use it for serving blogs and data over the Internet but that's not pertinent to my point.
Apparently you know something I don't. AFAIK the incumbent providers have pretty much nixed the Moore's Law model of communications development with their political contributions. Fixing this is far more expensive than running a few fibers to Tijuana or Nogales where persuading the necessary government officials is more of a retail operation.
Help stamp out iliturcy.