Invented by
American computer scientists during the 1970s, the Internet has been embraced around the
globe. During the networks first three decades, most Internet traffic
flowed through the
Engineers who
help run the Internet said that it would have been impossible for the
And now, the
balance of power is shifting. Data is increasingly flowing around the
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
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
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
But economics
also plays a role. Almost all nations see data networks as essential to
economic development. Its 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 wouldnt 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
The issue was
driven home this month when hackers attacked and immobilized several Georgian
government Web sites during the countrys fighting with
Ms. Claffy said that the shift away from the
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 couldnt keep it a secret. While the
Internet
technologists say that the global data network that was once a competitive
advantage for the
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
Whether
its a good or a bad thing depends on where you stand, said Vint Cerf, a computer scientist who is Googles
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
International
networks that carry data into and out of the
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
Internets 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.
Were
probably in one of those situations where things get a little bit harder,
said John Arquilla, a professor at the
Others say the
eclipse of the
This is
one of many dimensions on which well 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.
By contrast,
there were about 237 million Internet users in
The increasing
role of new competitors has shown up in data collected annually by Renesys, a firm in
Firms
that have slipped in the rankings have all been American: Verizon, Savvis, AT&T, Qwest, Cogent and AboveNet.
The