Report: Internet Traffic Flows Beyond U.S. Shores

“The Internet is Becoming Un-American.” So declares a new report from research firm TeleGeography. At first blush, it might look like the United States is losing its role as the world’s Internet leader, or that Silicon Valley no longer is the premier birthplace of next-generation business models, or even that domestic service providers should be worrying about their positions of power.

But not so fast. What the study actually finds is not so much that the Internet is becoming un-American — rather, it’s becoming the global animal technological evolution intended it to be.

In the early, DARPA days and for years afterward, the United States — its carriers and Internet exchanges — served as the primary hub for routing Internet traffic throughout the world. In recent times, though, that status has changed and continues to morph.

Hubs and Spokes

In 1991, 91 percent of international Internet capacity from Asia and 70 percent of African countries’ international Internet capacity connected to the United States, according to TeleGeography’s Dec. 4, 2008, report. By mid-2008, the share of Asian countries’ international Internet capacity to the United States had dropped to 54 percent. Meanwhile, the share of African countries’ bandwidth connected to the United States fell even more, to a mere 6 percent, as Europe took over the role of main Internet hub.

One might think the lower numbers signal that America is losing its Internet prominence. Yet that’s not the case, said Alan Mauldin, research director for TeleGeography.

“It’s not a bad thing that the world's Internet capacity is not largely routed through the United States,” Mauldin explained. “After all, it didn't make much sense for a user in Africa to send an e-mail to someone in France that actually traveled across the Atlantic to the U.S. and then back across the ocean again.”

The Internet is a system of hubs and spokes, Mauldin continued, and the emergence of new hubs “improves the quality and resiliency of the network for users worldwide.”

The shift does not speak to any failure on the part of U.S. ISPs, added Stephan Beckert, another research director for TeleGeography.

“Capacity connected to the U.S. has been growing rapidly,” he said. “It just has not been growing as rapidly as intra-regional links.”