US No Longer the World's Internet Hub 433
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."
No surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Americans would also be up in arms if most of their traffic was routed through China.
Pick your favorite intelligence agency (Score:2, Insightful)
He, who would rather be helping Russian or Chinese agencies, really ought to sleep in the bed they are making for themselves...
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.
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.
Re:Good Riddance (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Thanks, washington (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I'm glad! (Score:1, Insightful)
As a Brit I'm glad too. Now that our traffic is less likely to cross your borders, if one of your bonkers politicians finally gets the content-filtered Jesusnet they're demanding it will be much easier for the rest of us to ignore you.
The fallen pinnacle of freedom (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Oh hey (Score:5, Insightful)
US No Longer the World's Internet Hub (Score:3, Insightful)
Thank God!
The more you tighten your grip ... (Score:1, Insightful)
... the more computer systems slip through your fingers.
I have been predicting this for a long time (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
eh (Score:4, Insightful)
The whole point about the Internet... (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't miss the point. (Score:-1, Insightful)
People opposed to the destruction of your freedom love the US and the principles it stands for.
Technically, the US deserves a better network. Traffic flowing between the UK and China, for example, should be quicker through the US than it does through any other route. Every thing we do to monitor that traffic is money that should be spent on something else. It's not just a backbone issue. US last mile problems keep US citizens from participating and making money off a free network as much as it makes the US a low return market for the rest of the world.
As the article points out, a technically excellent network is not enough. Freedom and privacy trump speed at some point.
There's a vast cost to the little police state the mega corps have tried to inflict on the US. They think they have won a great prize, but it will melt in their hands. Prosperity depends on freedom and justice. People won't work without clear and just rewards. As the US economy consolidates to Soviet Union style ownership, it's output will shrink to a similar size.
Anyone who loves the US will be doing everything they can to insure the US has a strong and free internet. Without that, the US will plunge into an information dark age and take much of the rest of the world with it. Those of you outside of the US need should realize that your liberty and economy won't last long in a world dominated by the US, China and Russia as they exist today.
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".
Re:And other intelligence agencies in other countr (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Pick your favorite intelligence agency (Score:1, Insightful)
It seems to me all you are saying is that the US is a couple of years behind the curve. Give it a little more time.
We already have the "free speech zones". The secret camps. The torture policy. The contemptuous attitude of the MSM toward any idea not created in the echo chamber. And if Denver proves anything, the police state is equipped to the hilt. Another push or two on the law front before a McCain Supreme Court and we are there.
Re:Oh hey (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:No surprising (Score:2, Insightful)
America is in disadvantage. America wants globalization in a world that plays with different rules to those American are use too. China, Russia and the Islamic countries (all own by Dictaroships) don't really care if they spy, cheat or lie. They want control and power over all and that includes Americans. They are succeding in destroying the American values and that destruction is also coming from within America. It is very sad seeing this happening here. I am comming from a country were something similar happened (Venezuela). If you are not carefull you will be dominated by the bad forces of the world and they won't be as nice as Americans has been so far. Common Americans has not seen anything yet and they have no idea where they are heading to if they are not careful. I can not imagine the Internet dominated by a country like China. Those will really fu...yo..
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?
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.
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.
They think the same things China thinks. (Score:-1, Insightful)
They think they can identify and neutralize political and economic competitors by snooping on all communications. US companies built the Great Firewall of China, so they know all about the motives and how to sell the equipment to the greedy and power hungry. The result, as you can see, is ruin.
Re:I'm glad! (Score:2, 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.
The US is still playing junior varsity "nation building" by comparison.
"For England, James?"
Good job (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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.
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: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.
Spying concerns, really? (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
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>
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!"
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.
Re:Not surprising (Score:3, Insightful)
The internet is a redundant fault tolerant network. It routes around damage.
Yeah, well how do it route around the ISP that cuts off my service? Or the occasional boat anchor that cuts the cable?
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.
Re:I'm glad! (Score:3, Insightful)
When you say "you guys" you know you're talking to a bunch of dead people right?
But yup, Britain managed to leave 50 million worldwide dead its wake in the 19th C, with a little help from the Dutch & the Germans. How any of the European colonists have the gall to castigate modern China is almost beyond me. Using appropriated common land and "market forces" on the Indians to get them to grow opium instead of food in order to flood the Chinese mainland with narcotics has got to be one of the most audacious foreign policies in history!
Re:No surprising (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Good Riddance (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh, by that logic everyone lives at 0m from 'the surface', give or take the height of their apartment building.
Sea level is the only reasonable baseline we have, so nitpicking people for using it is just being a pedant.
Re:No surprising (Score:4, Insightful)
You think of the European Union that way because you've never been to America or an Islamic country. The EU has it easy because the powerful folks in the EU realize that they should at least give the average person a fair go at a decent (if anonymous) life.
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.
Re:You missed the important point. (Score:2, Insightful)
When were these golden old days? The Reagan years? Nixon presidency? Johnson and Vietnam? Kennedy instigating the Cuban missile crisis? Or are we going further back? FDR's internment camps? Hoover's isolationism (I suppose some would count that a good thing, other than the depression it contributed to)? How bout Teddy Roosevelt's doctrine - you know, the one Bush admires? Uh, do we even need to get into the 19th century presidents? Manifest destiny? What about that whole slavery business?
No, we only look good from a historical distance. At any one time, this country is doing any number of nasty, awful things - they're just seldom big enough to keep the rest of the world hostile longer than a decade. And the only reason we look decent historically is because, well, everybody else fucks up too. And they tend to fuck up worse.
Re:Pick your favorite intelligence agency (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sure you consider yourself a Solzhenitsyn-like dissident bravely fighting oppression
Certainly not, but then I'm not the one espousing these ideals. Attempting to combine a straw man and an ad hominem does not make your argument stronger.
My post was intended as a hypothetical argument. If I were to construct a totalitarian state then this is how I would treat dissidents. There is no point in locking up ineffectual protesters. The best approach was that taken in the first episode of Blake's 7 - the freedom fighter Roj Blake expected to be put on trial for his political activities. Instead he found himself facing a public trial for child molestation. The evidence was fabricated, but this didn't affect public perception much.
People speaking against your oppressive regime aren't a threat. Only people collecting popular support are. If you can prejudice the public not only against an individual, but against dissenting views in general then you are fairly safe. The government in the USA has tried this with numerous memes over the past eight years (and before then, of course), but the level of cynicism in the modern citizen renders them largely immune to a lot of this kind of manipulation.
China, with far better control of the media, does not have this limitation and have had much more success. Attacks by foreign media on the Chinese government's human rights record are seen internally as attacks on China (and the Chinese people) out of jealousy and so are often disregarded.
I've read Solzhenitsyn and you Sir are no Solzhenitsyn
As have I, but I can console myself with the fact that he was slightly under twice my present age when he started publishing. I've only been writing professionally for a couple of years, so I've got a long time to catch up.