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Can There Be a Non-US Internet?
Daniel_Stuckey writes "After discovering that the US government has been invading the privacy of not just Americans, but also Brazilians, Brazil is showing its teeth. The country responded to the spying revelations by declaring it'll just have to create its own internet. In reality, although Brazil President Dilma Rousseff is none too happy with the NSA's sketchy surveillance practices, Brazil and other up-and-coming economies have been pushing to shift the power dynamics of the World Wide Web away from a US-centric model for years."
That is not what they declared, building local cloud, secure email services and infrastructure is different from "creating it's own internet" and I never heard this wording here, only in "international" press. The big difference is that when someone talk like that it gives the idea that it will be separated from the rest of the internet. That is not what the Brazilian government is proposing.
The national constitution (I'm Brazilian) states that the State has to provide the basic rights that are not met otherwise (if you can't buy water the State has to provide it, there is free medical care, the best universities are free, etc). Since private communications are a basic right (our constitutuion and the universal declaration of human rights), they are planning to offer alternatives for people who care.
Honestly, to force local clouds seems like a double win. On one hand you make companies accountable for our citizens rights, on the other hand - the one I think is the main point here - it creates investments, infrastructure, brings technology and high tech jobs. The cables to Europe are a need, our internet sucks. I hope they make some cables to China and Russia too, as online gaming is better over there.
But mainly, there is no censorship here, Brazilians will not be separated from the internet and nobody in the country thinks that even a possibility. Specially since this government is the one that fought against censorship in the past, you know, during the US created military dictatorship from 64 to 86/90.
There Internet (Arpanet) existed before WWW. WWW is a subset of the Internet.
Ever use email? Dropbox? Online games from your XBox or PC? FTP? VOIP? Bittorrent?
All these and thousands more are internet protocols that don't use WWW.
And, by the way, we do have multiple Internets (with a big I). Read up on Internet 2. And there's lots and lots of internets (with a little i) that you don't know about because they're not connected to the Internet (with a big i)
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
That is exactly what Barizil is going to do: Run a cable across the Atlantic to South Africa. That will allow them to bypass most of the US snooping.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Their own internet might simply mean "not connected or dependent upon" the current network
I have seen nothing to indicate that Brazil is thinking of not allowing packets to be routed to the rest of the Internet, or even just to US; they are thinking of allowing packets to much of the rest of the world to be routed there without passing through the US, but that's another matter (and that appears to have been an idea originated in South Africa, well prior to the Snowden revelations).
Right now most places access the internet by buying capacity on a fiber to the US or western europe (usually whichever is closer) and then buying transit from a teir 1 provider there. They will sometimes peer or buy transit locally if they think it's in their interests to do so but the US and western europe act as the "routes of last resort".
There are various things a country could do to reduce the ammount of thier traffic that goes via the USA.
1: order local providers to keep local traffic within the country (whether by peering or by buying transit from the country's main provider) even if they don't see it as being in their commercial interests to do so.
2: Install direct links to major trading partners and order providers in their country to use those links even if they don't see it as being in their commercial interests to do so.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
And U.S. workers average ~40 work hours per week (42 for men, 38.5 for women), whereas German workers average 35 hours per week, so if you are measuring per hour, Germany wins, but if you are measuring per work week, the U.S. has a 14% advantage due to amount of time worked, and the U.S. wins.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#European_Union
Iran has already done it. It has built an Intranet like network which connects to outside world through few gateways. The transition of the network users to the new Intranet is being done at the time being and will complete in year.
The main purpose is the:
1- Avoid the internal Iranian traffic to travel over the internet (i.e. unknown countries). ....
2- To control in/out traffic (deep packet inspection, control access to outsider websites, attack and spying control, allow access to Iran-only websites just from inside Iran, emergency kill switch).
3- Force Iranian organizations to host their website in Iranian data centers.
4- Save traffic costs.
5- Flourish local hosting and cloud business and local peering between ISPs.