(TLD) Hosting Industry Centralization and Consolidation

[Future Sensors]

(TLD) Hosting Industry Centralization and Consolidation

Luciano Zembruzki, Raffaele Sommese, Lisandro Zambenedetti Granville, Arthur Selle Jacobs, Mattijs Jonker, Giovane C. M. Moura

NOMS 2022 - IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium

Abstract

There have been growing concerns about the concentration and centralization of Internet infrastructure. In this work, we scrutinize the hosting industry on the Internet by using active measurements, covering 19 Top-Level Domains (TLDs). We show how the market is heavily concentrated: 1/3 of the domains are hosted by only 5 hosting providers, all US-based companies. For the country-code TLDs (ccTLDs), however, hosting is primarily done by local, national hosting providers and not by the large American cloud and content providers. We show how shared languages (and borders) shape the hosting market — German hosting companies have a notable presence in Austrian and Swiss markets, given they all share German as official language. While hosting concentration has been relatively high and stable over the past four years, we see that American hosting companies have been continuously increasing their presence in the market related to high traffic, popular domains within ccTLDs — except for Russia, notably.​

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Funding for this work was provided in part by Capes PHD scholarship number 88887.480774/2020-00, the EU H2020 CONCORDIA project (830927) and the NWO-DHS MADDVIPR project (628.001.031/FA8750-19-2-0004). This research used data from OpenINTEL, a project of the University of Twente, SURF, SIDN, and NLnet Labs.​

Read more (PDF)

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.01187.pdf​