The Internet has shifted under our feet

carusoj writes: The way traffic moves over the Internet has changed radically in the last five years. Arbor Networks next week will present a study that found that the bulk of Internet traffic no longer moves across Tier-1 international transit providers. Instead, the traffic is handled directly by large content providers, content delivery networks and consumer networks, and is handed off from one of these to another. You can probably guess what some of these companies are: Google, Microsoft, Facebook. Arbor says there are about 30 of these companies – which Arbor calls “hyper giants” – that generate and consume about 30% of all Internet traffic.