> "Negotiating leverage has come from a seemingly mundane government power: the authority of the Federal Communications Commission to approve cable licenses. In deals involving a foreign company, say people familiar with the process, the FCC has held up approval for many months while the squadron of lawyers dubbed Team Telecom developed security agreements that went beyond what’s required by the laws governing electronic eavesdropping."

This is disgusting.

I would certainly hope that these companies can now sue the FCC in light of these new facts.

I almost puked on this one... Welcome the real telecom world I suppose....

Fuck it. Pull the wire to mexico or canada and leave the US without Access. Sooner or later, the big services will be moved away, and there is enough users in the rest of the world to not have to worry. Make Mexico the connection hub between North / south america as well as east <> west. Also make a huge deal that this traffic will be protected 100% without any interuptions from the US. If the US wants to connect to the rest of the world, you can do it at our terms, not the terms that they thing everyone should follow. Especially since they still seam to believe that they can presure people.

I dont know what the US said to the other countries but all of a sudden a bunch of countries, including Russia seams to be scared shitless. I dont know, its just a feeling. Time to ripoff all american buisiness ideas and put them up on servers in better parts of the world (island? no other places left, correct?). Then lets see what the fuck they will do!

Peter Thiel will fix you up with a seastead ;)

Because the Internet controlled by Los Zetas is a better world....

They have a lot of experience with both packets and denial-of-service attacks?

We'll build a treefort out back and eat candy for dinner every night, it'll be great.

Looks like a great time to start investing in undersea cabling between Europe and Latin America and between Latin America and Asia.

It might help some influential people to get off their asses if it were announced that new fiber is planned to be laid on routes which bypassed the US.

They would just tap it underwater as they have done in the past (and probably present).

"We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way."

Is tapping underwater cabling still a viable option with encrypted packeted communication where where equipment at both ends of the cable have performed a DH key exchange?

Fine, make them do it the hard way.

Wasn't that where Kim Dotcom wanted to drop a cable? (Or are you obliquely referencing it?)

Single-page, print version: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/agreements...