> Stuff like that always makes me wonder how much of it is down to the NSA being hooked straight into DE-CIX

It has been long established in the datacenter industry that if you build a building in $wierdplace, it is far more beneficial to your bottom line to haul your own traffic to a major exchange point than to pay to have each carrier come to you.

Further, everyone needs to stop worrying about the NSA. Yes they tap cables, no they don't care about what you ate for lunch. Dozens of countries monitor all traffic that crosses their borders, China does the same shit on all China Telecom owned fiber worldwide, other countries probably have fiber tap subs now, corporations will do it too if it makes them money. Encrypt your traffic, deploy TLS on sites you control, and stop trying to frame run of the mill networking decisions or any little issue you have on the internet on the hidden hand of espionage trying to steal your My Little Pony NFTs.

> It has been long established in the datacenter industry that if you build a building in $wierdplace, it is far more beneficial to your bottom line to haul your own traffic to a major exchange point than to pay to have each carrier come to you.

Unless you have a large enough customer base and can pressure carriers into peering with you in weird places. Deutsche Telekom AG in Germany does not peer at DE-CIX because they just don't want to. It's also the reason why YouTube regularly stutters in the evening for DTAG customers.

> Unless you have a large enough customer base and can pressure carriers into peering with you in weird places

You are confusing peering (settlement free interconnect) with interconnection points. If you wanted to build a datacenter in Finland and buy transit to reach the greater internet, it will always be cheaper to buy your own fiber to {London,Amsterdam,Frankfurt,etc} than to pay each carrier to extend their network into Finland.

> Deutsche Telekom AG in Germany does not peer at DE-CIX because they just don't want to.

This is false. DTGC is present at DE-CIX and is pushing between 10-20G of traffic. They may not want to peer with _you_, but they are peering across the exchange.

> It's also the reason why YouTube regularly stutters in the evening for DTAG customers.

You don't know that. Most YouTube traffic is served by Google Global Cache servers and doesn't transit the internet or public exchanges. DTAG may not have enough caches or capacity provisioned, but that is a decision they have made about their customers experience. Google will happily give them more cache nodes if they ask.

20G is very little. Versatel and Vodafone each have connections summing up to around 1,200G in Frankfurt alone.

I was a Telekom customer for a few years and YouTube was just unbearable after 7pm. Maybe they fixed it now or bullied content providers long enough.

You may want to read this Hetzner press release where they address DTAG's peering policy: https://www.hetzner.com/news/03-20-dtag/

If you don't like DTAG's peering policies, go work there and change them. But it is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand, which is physical interconnections between datacenters and carriers.

Can somebody explain the government's defense in that case?

"The court said DE-CIX could not cite article 10 of Germany’s Basic Law, which guarantees the privacy of communications, because the company was not directly affected by the BND operations."

I honestly don't understand how an argument like that holds water.

Easy; It wasn't DE-CIX privacy that was violated by BND operations, so DE-CIX can't sue against it.

Germany is home to such super weird and reaching legal arguments. If you want another one, check out the BNDs "Space theory" [0]

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weltraumtheorie