America discovered the Internet, but couldn’t keep it a secret.

The American dominance in the field of Internet traffic over the past 30 years is beginning to fade away and the change doesn’t impact only the economy and the IT industry, but may also affect fields such as the intelligence and the military.

Until the recent years, the Internet traffic was flowing through the switching equipment of United States-based companies, but the American hegemony couldn’t have been maintained for a very long period due to the very nature of the Internet – it has no central point of control. During recent years, the amount of Internet traffic flowing around the U.S. has been growing and this clearly indicates a shift in the balance of power.

"Because of the nature of global telecommunications, we are playing with a tremendous home-field advantage, and we need to exploit that edge," CIA Michael V. Hayden, said before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2006.

"We also need to protect that edge, and we need to protect those who provide it to us."

The desire of other countries to be in charge and control of their own communications channels corroborated with the passage of the Patriotic Act accelerated the process. From a 70% share of the world’s Internet traffic, the U.S. now only have about 25%, according to Andrew M. Odlyzko, a University of Minnesota professor, The New York Times reported.

Most countries realized that, by depending on other countries for their Internet traffic, they become vulnerable. The data networks are an essential part of a modern economy, just as the highway system is, and no country would want someone else to own its roads.

The most recent case which makes a perfect example is the Russia-Georgia cyber war. Several Georgian governmental Web sites were hacked and nearly paralyzed before the armed conflict began. The sites were so vulnerable because most of Georgia’s access to the global network flowed through Russia and Turkey.