[ih] Ingrid Burrington on North Virginia

[Patrick W. Gilmore]

At the very top of the article:

UP TO 70 PERCENT OF GLOBAL INTERNET TRAFFIC GOES THROUGH NORTHERN VIRGINIA

She lost all credibility before I got past the first sentence.

-- 
TTFN,
patrick

> On Jan 11, 2016, at 9:10 AM, Joly MacFie <joly at punkcast.com> wrote:
> 
> 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 <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/ <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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