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Why the Mediterranean Is the Net's Achilles' Heel
An anonymous reader writes "A spate of broken cables has brought disruption for many of the world's Web users in 2008 — and the Med has been at the center of the problems. For political reasons, the Mediterranean Sea is an Internet bottleneck through which the majority of traffic between Europe and Asia is squeezed. That traffic must run the gauntlet of earthquakes and heavy maritime traffic to reach its destination. Better and stronger cables are urgently needed to avoid a re-occurrence of the 2008 outages."
Fuck 'em.
:) Have a nice day.
That'll teach companies to move their jobs overseas. Those companies(and their overpaid executives) can cry a river to the employees they laid off only to give their jobs to India. Mods: I ask you to think about this before you mod me down, but if you want to waste your points, I don't give a fuck!
Europe and Asia are connected by land. While it might have to divert around a few non-cooperative countries, you'd think that sufficient backbone could be laid down over land routes to all necessary countries. It seems like underwater cables would be used only when absolutely necessary (such as from North America to Europe or Austrialia to Asia - and even then satellite is available (though with higher latency and lower bandwidth).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I considered modding you down, but decided to comment instead.
I understand your sentiment, but what you're ultimately suggesting is that we eliminate access to the internet for any country with a cheap labor pool. This punishes the citizens of those countries more than it does the execs of the major corporations that exploit them.
This story is about an international communications issue. If you want to talk about labor issues I would say this:
There are many powerful people trying to make protectionism a dirty word, if we want to fight them we have to be specific in our demands on who deserves Free Trade agreements or gets Preferred Trade Status. Protecting workers rights "over there" means increasing labor costs "over there" and makes them less appealing than local workers when you factor in communications and shipping costs (environmental protections should also figure into that equation). When they can treat their employees humanely, pay them a living wage, stop tainting the local water supply and still afford to send products to our markets cheaper than we can, then they deserve those jobs and we don't.
The problem is that we've spotted our competitors a huge advantage by not holding them to any of the standards we hold ourselves to. Which means we tied our own hands, or maybe slit our own throats.
I understand your sentiment, but what you're ultimately suggesting is that we eliminate access to the internet for any country with a cheap labor pool.
I heard it as a complaint that the CEOs are looking to short-term gains and not counting the very real risk that network connectivity from the US to India may be impaired at some points. If they didn't examine and account for that risk in their calculations, then they are incompetent or liars (or both).
When they can treat their employees humanely, pay them a living wage, stop tainting the local water supply and still afford to send products to our markets cheaper than we can, then they deserve those jobs and we don't.
Which is why the US should have tarrifs on a per-country basis related to worker conditions and environmental care. If they "externalize" industry cost by dumping toxins rather than cleaning or storing them, then we should increase the cost here by that amount. They can pay for good practices or we will charge them so that they would be making the same if they did.
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