How did we end up with a centralized Internet for the NSA to mine?

How did we end up with a centralized Internet for the NSA to mine?
Andy Oram, O'Reilly Radar, January 8, 2014
I covered the Wired article about NSA spying this week. Now Andy Oram writes, "my question today is: How did we get such industry concentration? Why is a network famously based on distributed processing, routing, and peer connections characterized now by a few choke points that the NSA can skim at its leisure?" I think this is a good question. More...