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US No Longer the World's Internet Hub
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sat Aug 30, 2008 10:21 AM
from the couldn't-last-forever dept.
from the couldn't-last-forever dept.
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."
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Technology: Patriot Act Haunts Google Service 277 comments
The Globe and Mail has an interesting piece taking a look at Google's latest headache, the US Government. Many people are suddenly deciding to spurn Google's services and applications because it opens up potential avenues of surveillance. "Some other organizations are banning Google's innovative tools outright to avoid the prospect of U.S. spooks combing through their data. Security experts say many firms are only just starting to realize the risks they assume by embracing Web-based collaborative tools hosted by a U.S. company, a problem even more acute in Canada where federal privacy rules are at odds with U.S. security measures."
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No surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Americans would also be up in arms if most of their traffic was routed through China.
Not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Not surprising (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:They think the same things China thinks. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re:No surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
I cannot believe no one has yet mentioned Gilmore's [toad.com] 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.
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Re:No surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:No surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:No surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:No surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Good Riddance (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Good Riddance (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Good Riddance (Score:5, Funny)
The Earth has a center, because it is a sphere. But no one lives outside a small band +/- 400m from the surface, so "the world" is a shell that has no center.
No one except the Mole Men, and they've got their own Internet. Which is really more an "Infranet", but that's their problem.
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Re:Good Riddance (Score:5, Funny)
So you are saying I could leave the world by going up or down?
Hmm, I think there are religions based on that...
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Re:Good Riddance (Score:5, Informative)
The Earth has a center, because it is a sphere. But no one lives outside a small band +/- 400m from the surface, so "the world" is a shell that has no center.
No one except the Mole Men, and they've got their own Internet. Which is really more an "Infranet", but that's their problem.
There are large population centers [wikipedia.org] more than 400m above sealevel (more than twice that, actually). Plus there are people in the dead sea [wikipedia.org] which is 420 meters below sea level.
And that's before we start counting the people living on the ISS, the people living in the salt mine city [wikipedia.org], Atlantians (Deeper or Higher than 400m depending on who you talk to) or the mole men.....
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Re:Good Riddance (Score:4, Informative)
"Sealevel" is "the surface" only at sea. There's practically no one living 400m above or below the actual surface of the sea.
The rest of the world lives within 400m of the surface, even if that surface is a mile above "sealevel".
And the ones outside that narrow shell aren't on the Internet. Except for a tiny few in another shell inhabited briefly by airplanes, and another orbital shell inhabited by fewer people than the sampling margin of error.
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Re:Good Riddance (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Good Riddance (Score:5, Insightful)
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".
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You missed the important point. (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
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Re:You missed the important point. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Good Riddance (Score:5, Informative)
I guess there is a good deal of cost-cutting and laziness involved in not having more independent connections. Most German providers, for instance, route their traffic through the DE-CIX node in Frankfurt instead of maintaining a dozen peer links.
This said, at some point it must be cheaper to have direct connections than buying capacity on a detour over the US. Especially where overseas cable are involved. A Google search brought up the following maps for the IPV6 net, and it seems that the countries outside the US do indeed build their own connections:
ahref=http://ipv6.nlsde.buaa.edu.cn/rel=url2html-19746 [slashdot.org]http://ipv6.nlsde.buaa.edu.cn/>
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Re:Good Riddance (Score:4, Insightful)
I wouldn't trust a country with the "emperor of heaven" as it's head of state either
As opposed to president appointed under God? The difference being, of course, that the president has actual power, while the emperor does not. </blatant flame>
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Just a marketing problem (Score:5, Funny)
"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!
and i think its important (Score:4, Funny)
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?
I'm glad! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Excellent post ! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:I'm glad! (Score:5, Informative)
And in the UK the government have mandated that much of your data is stored by ISPs via the braindead RIP act, and some other act demands that you hand over decryption keys or be in breach of the law. Hey, not much better.
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Re:I'm glad! (Score:5, Insightful)
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!"
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Thanks, washington (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Thanks, washington (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Thanks, washington (Score:4, Funny)
high-speed pizza delivery
And that whole pizza delivery thing will be gone as soon as we start hearing someone answering the phone as
Thank you for calling Domino's Pizza. This is Agent Jentson speaking, how can I help you?"
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Re:Thanks, washington (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, you Americans and your quaint complaining about the price of petrol [kshitij.com] :-).
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Free Market (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
It doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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:And other intelligence agencies in other countr (Score:4, Insightful)
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eh (Score:4, Insightful)
SOX probably more influential than Patriot Act (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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.
The whole point about the Internet... (Score:5, Insightful)
Better idea (Score:5, Funny)
Typical of Government these last few decades... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Just A thought. (Score:4, Interesting)
Feels like Fox News in Here (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Pick your favorite intelligence agency (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, because American intelligence agencies have morals!
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Re:Oh hey (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Oh hey (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Logical conclusion of this (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Logical conclusion of this (Score:5, Informative)
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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Re:Article Error (Score:4, Informative)
(In other words, no, it's not funny anymore, and provably false.)
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