[ih] Ingrid Burrington on North Virginia

[Joly MacFie]

Ingrid Burrington is on a personal mission to explore the physical presence
of the Internet, including its history.. I video'd her presentation at the
Radical/Networks conference a few months back.
https://livestream.com/internetsociety/radicalnetworks/videos/102810644

​Her latest piece is for NextGov, mainly about Amazon Data Centers​.
Excerpt.

http://www.nextgov.com/big-data/2016/01/70-percent-global-internet-traffic-goes-through-northern-virginia/124976/


The fact that northern Virginia is home to major intelligence operations
and to major nodes of network infrastructure isn’t exactly a sign of
government conspiracy so much as a confluence of histories (best documented
by Paul Ceruzzi in his criminally under-read history *Internet Alley: High
Technology In Tysons Corner, 1945-2005*). To explain why a region
surrounded mostly by farmland and a scattering of American Civil War
monuments is a central point of Internet infrastructure, we have to go back
to where a lot of significant moments in Internet history take place: the
Cold War.

Postwar suburbanization and the expansion of transportation networks are
occasionally overlooked, but weirdly crucial facets of the
military-industrial complex. While suburbs were largely marketed to the
public via barely concealed racism and the appeal of manicured “natural”
landscapes, suburban sprawl’s dispersal of populations also meant increased
likelihood of survival in the case of nuclear attack. Highways both
facilitated suburbs and supported the movement of ground troops across the
continental United States, should they need to defend it (lest we forget
that the legislation that funded much of the U.S. highway system was called
the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956).

Both of these factors were at play in the unincorporated area of northern
Virginia known as Tysons Corner, an area just far away enough from
Washington to be relatively safe from nuclear attack but close enough to
remain accessible. One of the region’s earliest military outposts was
actually a piece of communications infrastructure: a microwave tower built
in 1952 that was the first among several relays connecting Washington to
the “Federal Relocation Arc” of secret underground bunkers created in case
of nuclear attack.

The particular alignments of highways that eventually connected Dulles
International Airport in Virginia to the Capitol Beltway basically made
this pocket of northern Virginia the first and last place for any
commercial activities between the airport and D.C. This led to an
outcropping of office parks that housed not only defense contractors, but
also government IT and time-sharing services and, later, companies like
MCI, AOL, and UUNet.

Thanks to that concentration of network companies and a whole lot of
support from the National Science Foundation, Tysons Corner became home to
MAE-East, one of the earliest Internet exchanges and home to the foundation
of what would become that Internet backbone. Networks build atop networks,
and the presence of this backbone in Tysons Corner led to more backbone,
more tech companies, and more data centers. Today, up to 70 percent of
Internet traffic *worldwide* travels through this region, as the Loudon
county economic-development board cheerfully notes in its marketing
materials.

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Joly MacFie  218 565 9365 Skype:punkcast
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