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Comment by TorKlingberg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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-...

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

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.

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