Though the internet was developed as an American enterprise, its global nature was such that experts knew all along that eventually, the system wouldn’t flow all of its traffic through the U.S., that there would be traffic that never came through data centers in this country.

That day is here, undoubtedly accelerated by the activities of the Bush Administration and the Patriot Act and its philosophical foundations.

Increasingly, foreign countries and businesses, not willing to let our government possibly filter and read their data traffic, are spending money to build data centers on the net that mean their data stays well away from our shores. This is a problem for security, since the CIA won’t have the opportunity to sniff all the internet traffic that they could before, but more importantly in the long term, it’s a problem of commerce. Before, any business that wanted to be on the internet had to have some connection to our economy.

Not so anymore.