AquaLab · Northwestern University

Consolidation in Internet Infrastructure
Constraint, Choice, and Consequence

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.

61
Countries
82%
Internet Pop.
1.17M
URLs Analyzed
8K+
Providers
17
CDNs Studied
1
How concentrated is the Internet?
Third-party service (DNS, CDN, CA) dependencies across commercial and government websites across dozens of countries.
2
When is consolidation a constraint vs. a choice?
A within-country observational design separates structural consolidation from strategic deployment decisions.
3
Does it matter?
Comparing the two regimes across resilience (redundancy), exposure (foreign dependency), and performance (latency, CDN steering).
Q1

How Concentrated Is the Internet?

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.

#COUNTRYOVERALL DNS CA CDN
1
CNChina
40
60
40
19
2
VNVietnam
47
48
45
47
3
RORomania
48
47
50
48
4
IDIndonesia
48
50
47
46
5
NLNetherlands
49
48
50
50
6
ESSpain
49
47
52
49
7
THThailand
49
50
48
48
8
PLPoland
50
49
52
50
9
SESweden
50
48
53
49
10
ARArgentina
51
50
51
53
11
CLChile
51
49
52
53
12
TWTaiwan
51
48
48
56
13
BRBrazil
52
55
50
52
14
ITItaly
53
50
54
55
15
DEGermany
54
52
55
56
16
FRFrance
54
53
55
54
17
KRSouth Korea
55
54
52
58
18
HKHong Kong
56
56
56
57
19
ZASouth Africa
56
59
55
53
20
TRTurkey
57
55
55
60
21
JPJapan
57
54
56
60
22
GBUnited Kingdom
58
58
58
59
23
ILIsrael
58
55
55
63
24
MXMexico
59
60
58
60
25
INIndia
61
64
64
55
26
NZNew Zealand
61
64
64
56
27
CACanada
62
63
64
60
28
SGSingapore
65
71
63
62
29
USUnited States
66
72
63
64
30
AUAustralia
67
70
64
68
High (≥60)
Moderate (50–59)
Lower (<50)
92%
Avg. served by top-3 providers
70%
CDN-using sites on Google alone
14%
CDN dependency growth in one year
Q2

When Is Consolidation a Constraint vs. a Choice?

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).

4
Structural
20
Strategic
6
Low Concentration
AU
US
SG
CA
IN
NZ
MX
GB
IL
TR
JP
HK
ZA
KR
DE
FR
IT
BR
AR
CL
TW
PL
SE
NL
ES
TH
RO
ID
VN
CN
Q3a

Does the Distinction Matter for Resilience?

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.

1
Median DNS Provider Count

Across both structural and strategic regimes, the median number of DNS providers per government domain is just one. Neither consolidation type buys organizational redundancy.

⚠️
Single Points of Failure

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.

🔑
Implication

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.

Q3b

Does It Matter for Exposure?

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.

Foreign Exposure by Regime

Median government foreign provider exposure (WHOIS based)

15%
vs
8%
Hosting foreign exposure: structural governments rely on more foreign providers than strategic ones
~97%
CA foreign exposure is near total regardless of regime. Almost all certificate authorities are foreign, making this layer structurally difficult for most governments to localize.

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.

Q3c

Does It Matter for Performance?

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.

Median Government Latency by Regime

Strategic governments achieve consistently lower latency than structural peers. Minimum RTT (ms) from in-country vantage points.

121 ms
Strategic hosting latency
173 ms
Structural hosting latency
43%
Faster when consolidation is chosen

Publications

Peer-reviewed papers underlying this work.

ACM SIGMETRICS2023

Each at Its Own Pace: Third-Party Dependency and Centralization Around the World

R. Kumar, S. Asif, E. Lee, F.E. Bustamante

PDF ↗

Large-scale study of DNS, CDN, and CA dependencies across 50 countries.

ACM IMC2024

Of Choices and Control – A Comparative Analysis of Government Hosting

R. Kumar, E. Carisimo, L. De Angelis Riva, M. Buzzone, F.E. Bustamante, I.A. Qazi, M.G. Beiro

PDF ↗

First large-scale analysis of third-party infrastructure in government digital services across 61 countries.

NINeS2026

Who Holds the Steering Wheel? Opacity and Consolidation in CDN Replica Selection

R. Kumar, F.E. Bustamante, M. Flores

PDF ↗

First methodology to infer CDN replica selection strategies at global scale across 17 CDNs and 19 countries.

SIGCOMMUnder Review

You Can't Always Choose: Structural vs. Strategic Consolidation in Government Web Infrastructure

Anonymous (double-blind)

Within-country observational design distinguishing ecosystem constraints from government deployment choices.

SIGCOMMUnder Review

Hidden Dependencies: The Internet Paths of Government

Anonymous (double-blind)

Large-scale analysis of Internet paths to government websites, revealing foreign on-path exposure and path centralization across countries.

Team

Researchers across institutions and continents.

RK
Rashna Kumar
Ph.D. Candidate · Northwestern
FEB
Fabián E. Bustamante
Advisor · PI · Northwestern
EC
Esteban Carisimo
Northwestern / Cloudflare
SA
Sana Asif
Northwestern
EL
Elise Lee
Northwestern
MF
Marcel Flores
Netflix
MB
Marinho Barcellos
University of Waikato
AP
Amreesh Phokeer
Internet Society
IAQ
Ihsan Ayyub Qazi
LUMS
RS
Raffaele Sommese
University of Twente
MGB
Mariano G. Beiro
U. San Andres
LDAR
Lukas De Angelis Riva
U. Buenos Aires
MB
Mauricio Buzzone
U. Buenos Aires
National Science Foundation
Comcast Innovation Fund