It's not because of some mysterious security reason. Latency between Asia and Europe is doubled by going through the US. You can't argue with the speed of light.

Even when the speed of light is not an issue (i.e. Canada), many people are essentially barred from storing data in US websites, because the possibility of warrantless searches conflict with privacy laws.

That's nice, but the article was about transport routes, not what happens at the end points.

"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."

Direct quote, above the fold, first page.

"some say.. those actions. may be"

Sure would be nice if the newspaper of record could come up with something a little more substantive in their reporting/analysis.

I'm not arguing with the premise -- I have no data to go one way or another. But I still have no data, and I read the article. Something wrong about that. The NYT really should be better than that.

That paragraph is followed immediately by an example, which I included.

A general, vague statement followed by an anecdote does not a news story make. It's just noise.

A study, with details on how the study was done and comparisons to previous studies/measurements? Different animal entirely.

Think about it this way. It would not be hard, using the same standards of journalism, to write another true story with the opposite conclusion.

Are you suggesting that no other government on Earth is capable of, or willing to do warrantless searches?

Only saying that (as the article briefly touches on) companies and governments in Canada and Europe are not allowed to store sensitive data on US websites (by law). Kind of a competitive disadvantage.

In this house we Obey the Laws of Physics.

I'm surprised by the frankness of the CIA and other experts talking about how much of a "home court" advantage the US has in terms of intelligence gathering...

The internet was supposed to provide redundant routes between points.

Increasingly due to financial reasons people have moved away from that model, since building redundancy typically costs money, and 99.9% of the time the lack of redundancy isn't causing issues.

However, as the requirements for bandwidth, speed and responsiveness keeps increasing, there is no doubt that people will look into establishing more efficient and direct routes to help accomplish this, instead of just sending everything out in the wild, and across the US.

Add to this the incredibly arrogant US "we own the world" powertrip and communications monitoring, and you have to wonder why people are still routing things trough the US when not strictly needed.