The following is the 500-mile email story in the form it originally appeared, in a post to sage-members on Sun, 24 Nov 2002.

In this post, I argue that this particular Rubicon has long been crossed, and that we should take a dim view of buying yet more telecommunications infrastructure and services from potential geopolitical foes.
Instead, we should work very hard to regain some semblance of control over our current telecommunications infrastructure - something we have long lost.