[TorKlingberg]

I used to do traceroute to addresses far away like Japan or Australia to which way it takes. Packets often went through the US even when you'd think there's a shorter route.

These days traceroute to a random .jp or .au just gets you to the nearest CloudFlare or AWS, which is a bit sad in a way.

[kemals]

If there was a shorter route and you took longer one you are dealing with suboptimal routing :)

However, "is a bit sad in a way" part of sentence is interesting one. Edge services hosted within AWS/Cloudflare/Akamai improved customer experience significantly given that waiting for trans-Atlantic or trans-Pacific latencies is not thing any more.

[autoexec]

It just shows how much the internet has changed. Now all our online traffic is increasingly being limited to a smaller and smaller set of networks/companies. You get less of a "We're a community of networks all throwing packets around for each other to make the internet happen" feeling and more of a "We're just another source of data to mine by a small number of cloud services." sort of feeling I guess.

[nomel]

> with suboptimal routing

Or, perhaps optimal surveillance [1][2]. I can only assume this sort of thing has expanded substantially since then.

1. https://theintercept.com/2018/06/25/att-internet-nsa-spy-hub...

2. https://tcf.org/content/report/surveillance-without-borders-...

[ugjka]

Routing is money, ISPs need to pay more for better routing

[fomine3]

In most cases, route from Japan to Europe is routed via US. It takes over 200ms. CDN improved our life much but I agree which is a bit sad in a way.