The Internet interprets the USA as damage and routes around it

Davey Winder
Tuesday, 02 September 2008 20:15

Business IT - Networking

For 30 years, no matter where your Internet data was headed the chances are that it made a bypass through the fat pipes and quick switches of the USA in order to get there. Now fears over the World Police spying on that traffic have prompted many countries to start routing around, rather than through, the United States...

John Gilmore was a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cypherpunks group and the GNU Flash Player called Gnash.

However, way back in 1993 he said something that was quoted in TIME magazine that struck a chord:

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it"

It was a powerful line then, and remains so now. People still manage to find ways to bypass Internet filtering systems wherever they may be applied. The Internet was built to work that way.
 
However, what if you replace censorship in that quote with another word? What if the word you insert is snooping? Would the Internet still route around it?

It is an interesting question, because ever since the Internet was born much of the traffic that flows around it has also flowed through the US. Even if you were sending an email to someone in the same room, let alone the same city or same country, it would get routed through the United States first.

The process has even got a name: it is called tromboning, for pretty obvious reasons.

It happens for reasons that are, perhaps, less obvious. These usually revolve around money, it has to be said. Complicated tariffs and pricing anomalies are at the forefront of much tromboning.

Then there is the small matter of inter-ISP rivalry, where one ISP would rather exchange data with an International operator than a local competitor.

However, the political landscape is changing and that is impacting upon the Internet routing map as well. Find out why the US is being cut out of the data traffic loop on page 2...

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