[governance] Internet Traffic Begins to Bypass the U.S

[Parminder]

Thought will be useful to the list. Parminder 

 

 

Internet Traffic Begins to Bypass the U.S. By JOHN MARKOFF

 

SAN FRANCISCO - The era of the American Internet is ending.

 

Invented by American computer scientists during the 1970s, the Internet has
been embraced around the globe. During the network's first three decades,
most Internet traffic flowed through the United States. In many cases, data
sent between two locations within a given country also passed through the
United States.

 

Engineers who help run the Internet said that it would have been impossible
for the United States to maintain its hegemony over the long run because of
the very nature of the Internet; it has no central point of control.

 

And now, the balance of power is shifting. Data is increasingly flowing
around the United States, which may have intelligence - and conceivably
military - consequences.

 

American intelligence officials have warned about this shift. "Because of
the nature of global telecommunications, we are playing with a tremendous
home-field advantage, and we need to exploit that edge," 

Michael V. Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency,
testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2006. "We also need to
protect that edge, and we need to protect those who provide it to us."

 

Indeed, 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.

 

"Since passage of the Patriot Act, many companies based outside of the
United States have been reluctant to store client information in the U.S.,"
said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy
Information Center in Washington. "There is an ongoing concern that U.S. 

intelligence agencies will gather this information without legal process.
There is particular sensitivity about access to financial information as
well as communications and Internet traffic that goes through U.S.
switches."

 

But economics also plays a role. Almost all nations see data networks as
essential to economic development. "It's no different than any other
infrastructure that a country needs," said K C Claffy, a research scientist
at the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis in San Diego. "You
wouldn't want someone owning your roads either."

 

Indeed, more countries are becoming aware of how their dependence on other
countries for their Internet traffic makes them vulnerable. 

Because of tariffs, pricing anomalies and even corporate cultures, Internet
providers will often not exchange data with their local competitors. They
prefer instead to send and receive traffic with larger international
Internet service providers.

 

This leads to odd routing arrangements, referred to as tromboning, in which
traffic between two cites in one country will flow through other nations. In
January, when a cable was cut in the Mediterranean, Egyptian Internet
traffic was nearly paralyzed because it was not being shared by local
I.S.P.'s but instead was routed through European operators.

 

The issue was driven home this month when hackers attacked and immobilized
several Georgian government Web sites during the country's fighting with
Russia. Most of Georgia's access to the global network flowed through Russia
and Turkey. A third route through an undersea cable linking Georgia to
Bulgaria is scheduled for completion in September.

 

Ms. Claffy said that the shift away from the United States was not limited
to developing countries. The Japanese "are on a rampage to build out across
India and China so they have alternative routes and so they don't have to
route through the U.S."

 

Andrew M. Odlyzko, a professor at the University of Minnesota who tracks the
growth of the global Internet, added, "We discovered the Internet, but we
couldn't keep it a secret." While the United States carried 70 percent of
the world's Internet traffic a decade ago, he estimates that portion has
fallen to about 25 percent.

 

Internet technologists say that the global data network that was once a
competitive advantage for the United States is now increasingly outside the
control of American companies. They decided not to invest in lower-cost
optical fiber lines, which have rapidly become a commodity business.

 

That lack of investment mirrors a pattern that has taken place elsewhere in
the high-technology industry, from semiconductors to personal computers.

 

The risk, Internet technologists say, is that upstarts like China and India
are making larger investments in next-generation Internet technology that is
likely to be crucial in determining the future of the network, with
investment, innovation and profits going first to overseas companies.

 

"Whether it's a good or a bad thing depends on where you stand," said Vint
Cerf, a computer scientist who is Google's Internet evangelist and who, with
Robert Kahn, devised the original Internet routing protocols in the early
1970s. "Suppose the Internet was entirely confined to the U.S., which it
once was? That wasn't helpful."

 

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.

 

While there has been some concern over a looming Internet traffic jam
because of the rise in Internet use worldwide, the congestion is generally
not on the Internet's main trunk lines, but on neighborhood switches,
routers and the wires into a house.

 

As Internet traffic moves offshore, it may complicate the task of American
intelligence gathering agencies, but would not make Internet surveillance
impossible.

 

"We're probably in one of those situations where things get a little bit
harder," said John Arquilla, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in
Monterey, Calif., who said the United States had invested far too little in
collecting intelligence via the Internet. "We've given terrorists a free
ride in cyberspace," he said.

 

Others say the eclipse of the United States as the central point in
cyberspace is one of many indicators that the world is becoming a more level
playing field both economically and politically.

 

"This is one of many dimensions on which we'll have to adjust to a reduction
in American ability to dictate terms of core interests of ours," said Yochai
Benkler, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at
Harvard. "We are, by comparison, militarily weaker, economically poorer and
technologically less unique than we were then. We are still a very big
player, but not in control."

 

China, for instance, surpassed the United States in the number of Internet
users in June. Over all, Asia now has 578.5 million, or 39.5 percent, of the
world's Internet users, although only 15.3 percent of the Asian population
is connected to the Internet, according to Internet World Stats, a market
research organization.

 

By contrast, there were about 237 million Internet users in North America
and the growth has nearly peaked; penetration of the Internet in the region
has reached about 71 percent.

 

The increasing role of new competitors has shown up in data collected
annually by Renesys, a firm in Manchester, N.H., that monitors the
connections between Internet providers. The Renesys rankings of Internet
connections, an indirect measure of growth, show that the big winners in the
last three years have been the Italian Internet provider Tiscali, China
Telecom and the Japanese telecommunications operator KDDI.

 

Firms that have slipped in the rankings have all been American: Verizon,
Savvis, AT&T, Qwest, Cogent and AboveNet.

 

"The U.S. telecommunications firms haven't invested," said Earl Zmijewski,
vice president and general manager for Internet data services at Renesys.
"The rest of the world has caught up. I don't see the AT&T's and Sprints
making the investments because they see Internet service as a commodity."

 

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.igcaucus.org/pipermail/governance/attachments/20080831/b8905942/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.cpsr.org
To be removed from the list, send any message to:
     governance-unsubscribe at lists.cpsr.org

For all list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance