Deutsche Telekom is complicit in this spying. It is because of DT's policies on peering that Internet companies in Germany send traffice destined to another Ger

Deutsche Telekom is complicit in this spying. It is because of DT's policies on peering that Internet companies in Germany send traffice destined to another German company, via other countries. Germany could fix this by requiring all German ISPs to supply free bilateral peering to any other German ISP with more than X Mbps of traffic. This is not actually free, but it means that no ISP can use peering as a profit centre. In fact, both parties to the bilateral peering have to pay for their own routers for the interconnect, and pay half the cost of the interconnect circuit if it is not done in the same building. This would be an improvement in speed too because within the borders of Germany you should be able to get 10 ms round trip times to any other point. In fact, companies who want their VPN traffic to stay in Germany will often specify 10 ms RTT in their RFPs as a euphemism for "keep our traffic in Germany". I used to work for GTS, a competitor of DT and we had an extensive enough presence in Germany to meet that RTT which rather surprised DT because I think they invented the requirement hoping that it would mean "only DT can win this bid". It would be better if all countries had laws/regulations about exchanging local traffic locally, because this would improve Internet performance for everyone.