You can't assess the resilience of what you can't observe. We develop the measurements, methods, and frameworks needed to make Internet infrastructure consolidation visible — to distinguish concentration that reflects ecosystem constraints from concentration that reflects choices — so that its consequences can be understood and addressed.
We find that consolidation is pervasive — a handful of providers dominate DNS, CDN, and CA services across both commercial and government websites. But the same concentration score can mean very different things in different countries.
Prior work — including our own — treats consolidation as a scalar quantity. We show it's better understood as a two-dimensional phenomenon: how concentrated and why.
By comparing government websites against popularity-stratified domestic commercial baselines, we classify each country–service pair into two regimes: structural consolidation (government mirrors the ecosystem's constraints — limited local providers, sparse infrastructure) or strategic consolidation (government diverges from what the ecosystem would predict — an active deployment choice).
If consolidation types differ, do they produce different resilience outcomes? Surprisingly, no.
Governments that chose to consolidate don't end up more resilient than those that had no choice.
Across both structural and strategic regimes, the median number of DNS providers per government domain is just one. Neither consolidation type buys organizational redundancy.
Strategic governments choose specific providers — but they don't diversify across them. A single provider outage could affect the majority of government DNS in most countries, regardless of regime type.
Consolidation — whether constrained or chosen — universally fails to produce redundancy. This suggests that resilience requires deliberate multi-provider strategies beyond what either regime currently delivers.
Structural consolidation produces uniform foreign exposure; strategic consolidation produces high variance. At the hosting layer, strategic governments keep more infrastructure domestic. But the effect fades at higher layers — CA foreign exposure is near-saturated for everyone.
Median government foreign provider exposure (WHOIS based)
Path exposure adds another dimension. Strategic consolidation affects not just where services are hosted but which network paths citizens traverse. IXP presence and transit choices introduce exposure that hosting level analysis alone cannot detect.
Consolidation shapes performance through three linked mechanisms: where infrastructure is deployed, how CDNs steer users to replicas, and whether resolver consolidation degrades the signal that drives steering.
Strategic governments achieve consistently lower latency than structural peers. Minimum RTT (ms) from in-country vantage points.
Peer-reviewed papers underlying this work.
R. Kumar, S. Asif, E. Lee, F.E. Bustamante
Large-scale study of DNS, CDN, and CA dependencies across 50 countries.
R. Kumar, E. Carisimo, L. De Angelis Riva, M. Buzzone, F.E. Bustamante, I.A. Qazi, M.G. Beiro
First large-scale analysis of third-party infrastructure in government digital services across 61 countries.
R. Kumar, F.E. Bustamante, M. Flores
First methodology to infer CDN replica selection strategies at global scale across 17 CDNs and 19 countries.
Anonymous (double-blind)
Within-country observational design distinguishing ecosystem constraints from government deployment choices.
Anonymous (double-blind)
Large-scale analysis of Internet paths to government websites, revealing foreign on-path exposure and path centralization across countries.
Researchers across institutions and continents.