> In some cases, countries are taking extreme steps, such as building new Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), which allow networks to interconnect directly, and encouraging local interconnection to keep local traffic local. We find that although many of these efforts are extensive, they are often futile, due to the inherent lack of hosting and route diversity for many popular sites.
Anyone with a background of datacenter, IDC or VPS knows a simple fact: most of the time, the default routes are often sub-optimal. Even if you are using a CDN, sometimes the traffic just doesn't terminated at the local/nearest/best-connected datacenter of your CDN provider, but a remote datacenter, sometimes in another country. Pretty frustrating.
Because the traffic travels through the cheapest and/or the most convenient path, not the shortest path, and it also depends on your physical location, your ISP, the network topology of your local ISP, the national/international infrastructure, etc.
Finding the optimal path for a specific ISP is a pretty tricky task. My networking-guru friends have the ability to learn the interconnections of different datacenter through the BGP looking glass, and identify the fastest VPS to rent based on their experience in the industry, the knowledge of the national/international infrastructure (which core router the network is using? which submarine cable does this ISP use? which national subnet of the ISP is the server located?, etc).
It is very common that your traffic have to travel around the entire Earth, and crossing USA in the middle, even if you are just connecting to a nearby continent.
Sadly, there is almost nothing anyone can do to about it.
I wouldn't be surprised if the EU passed a law requiring domestic traffic to stay domestic. You could even argue existing privacy laws require it already - it just hasn't been enforced in that way.
It's not a hard problem to work around if ISPs were sufficiently motivated to deal with it.
A few German ISPs/internet companies made noise about keeping traffic locally during the Snowden leaks, some were slightly miffed when others pointed out that it would already be the case if they played ball and freely peered with everyone at the German IXPs. (Although with the biggest one of those being monitored by German intelligence agencies with whatever filtering rules the NSA gave them fairly pointless too)
Anyone with a background of datacenter, IDC or VPS knows a simple fact: most of the time, the default routes are often sub-optimal. Even if you are using a CDN, sometimes the traffic just doesn't terminated at the local/nearest/best-connected datacenter of your CDN provider, but a remote datacenter, sometimes in another country. Pretty frustrating.
Because the traffic travels through the cheapest and/or the most convenient path, not the shortest path, and it also depends on your physical location, your ISP, the network topology of your local ISP, the national/international infrastructure, etc.
Finding the optimal path for a specific ISP is a pretty tricky task. My networking-guru friends have the ability to learn the interconnections of different datacenter through the BGP looking glass, and identify the fastest VPS to rent based on their experience in the industry, the knowledge of the national/international infrastructure (which core router the network is using? which submarine cable does this ISP use? which national subnet of the ISP is the server located?, etc).
It is very common that your traffic have to travel around the entire Earth, and crossing USA in the middle, even if you are just connecting to a nearby continent.
Sadly, there is almost nothing anyone can do to about it.