Once Dominant, U.S. Loses Sway in Cyberspace Americans No Longer in Control As Other Internet Powers Emerge

By John Markoff

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 first three decades of its existence, most of the network’s traffic flowed through the United States. In many cases, data sent between two locations within a country also passed through U.S.-based routers.

Now, however, the balance of power is shifting. Data are increasingly flowing around the United States, which may have serious intelligence – and conceivably military – consequences. Internet engineers who help run the network 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.

They also note that the global data network that was once a competitive advantage for the United States is now increasingly outside the control of American companies.

The shift is one that U.S. intelligence officials have warned about. "Because of the nature of global telecommunications, we are playing with a tremendous home-field advantage, and we need to exploit that edge," said Michael Hayden, the director of the CIA, in testimony before the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. Senate in 2006. "We also need to protect that edge, and we need to protect those who provide it to us."

Internet industry executives and government officials have acknowledged that when Internet traffic passed through the switching equipment of companies based in the United States, it proved a distinct advantage for American intelligence agencies. In December of 2005, The New York Times reported that the National Security Agency, with the cooperation of American telecommunications companies, had established a program that included the interception of foreign Internet communications.

U.S. government policies may have played a role in the efforts of governments in Canada and Europe to expand their Internet structure. "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 global economics also plays a role. Almost all nations see data networks as essential to future economic development. "It’s no different than any other infrastructure that a country needs," said KC 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 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, preferring 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 a 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 ISPs but instead was routed through European operators.

The risk of one nation being directly dependent on another for Internet connectivity was driven home recently during the military conflict between Georgia and Russia, when huge denial-of-service attacks struck Georgian government Web sites. Most of Georgia’s access to the global network flowed through Russia and Turkey. A third route based on an undersea cable linking Georgia to Bulgaria is scheduled for completion in September.

Claffy noted 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.," she said.

Meanwhile, American companies have decided not to invest in deploying global Internet links, which has 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.

"We discovered the Internet, but we couldn’t keep it a secret," said Andrew Odlyzko, a professor at the University of Minnesota who tracks the growth of the Internet globally. He estimates that while a decade ago the United States carried 70 percent of the world’s Internet traffic, that number has fallen to about 25 percent.

The risk, Internet technologists said, is that upstart competitors 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 coming first to non-American 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, designed 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."

But as Internet traffic moves outside U.S. borders, it may complicate the task of American intelligence agencies.

"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, California, 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 note that the eclipse of the United States as the central point in cyberspace is one of many indicators that 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 University. "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, despite the fact that only 15.3 percent of the Asian population is now connected to the Internet, according to Internet World Stats, a market research organization that tracks Internet usage by region.

By contrast, there were about 237 million North American Internet users and growth there has nearly peaked, with Internet penetration at about 71 percent.

The increasing role of new competitors has shown up in data collected by Renesys, a U.S. company that monitors connections between Internet providers. The Renesys rankings of Internet connections, an indirect measure of growth, show that the big winners in the past three years have been Tiscali of Italy, China Telecom, and the Japanese telecommunications operator KDDI. Companies 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 of 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."

"It’s getting people’s attention and they’re seeing it as part of their national policy," Zmijewski said.

Originally published by The New York Times Media Group.

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