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Comment by oneofthose | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me or is this a 180 degree turn around for Deutsche Telekom? After the NSA scandal they planned to create an "All-German Internet" [0] (a strange plan to begin with) but now they seem to be saying: we don't care, let us let our users store their data in "in data centers across the United States" [1]. As if nothing ever happened.

[0] http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/deutsche-telekom... [1] https://www.dropbox.com/help/7/en

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Oh come on, "email made in Germany" was a marketing stunt all along - a simple way to benefit from the general rage related to the NSA scandal. It didn't make any sense in the first place and I'm sure Telekom is very well aware of this.

That's right since the "email made in Germany" and "full encryption" only works between the 3/4 major email providers in Germany.

DT like any other company wants to sell and is pure marketing strategy.

The "All German Internet" plan was an attempt to extract money out of service providers in Germany.

There are strong peering interconnects in Germany, most notably DE-CIX (AFAIK the largest interconnect world-wide). Who's not present there? Telekom.

There are two ways to connect with our beloved former monopolist (who still captures a significant part of the market through inertia): Either you peer directly (and they have rather arcane and costly ideas about what that means, and where the pipe goes to that you will be leasing), or you go through one of the international backbone providers that are too big for Telekom to ignore.

Which is why communication with Telekom customers from the outside (data centers in Germany, other ISPs) tends to cross the Atlantic twice.

Telekom's PR attempt was mostly targetted at politics to try to get them to pressure other internet infrastructure companies to pay up for direct peering with Telekom.

Here's what DE-CIX had to say about it (German only, they don't seem to have translated that particular press release, obviously biased): http://presse.de-cix.net/press-releases/pressemitteilung/art...

I have worked a lot with people from all levels at Telekom over the past year. Privacy is still a huge theme, but it's a big company with many initiative & unfortunately left/right hand coordination is often lacking. Last year they did a similar deal with Evernote & Box, so nothing out of the ordinary here.

They will have this only outside of Germany. You know to keep the show running.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/16/dropbox-de...

Especially since Telekom has its own cloud storage service.

Especially since there was a story the other day about the US government having access to US companies' servers, regardless of whether or not they are on US soil.

Or the whole, "lol honeypot for files",

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/07/14/jtrig... (shaping and honeypots) ... so uh, that Rice to the board looks a bit more obvious now.

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