Consolidation Watch

Making Internet infrastructure consolidation visible.

Project Overview

The Internet was designed as a decentralized network, yet its infrastructure has been steadily consolidating. A small number of cloud providers, CDNs, and DNS resolvers now mediate a growing share of global traffic. This consolidation has profound implications for resilience, sovereignty, competition, and user choice — but its scope, mechanisms, and consequences remain poorly understood.

Consolidation Watch is a long-term research effort to develop the measurements, methods, and frameworks needed to make this consolidation visible. Our goal is to distinguish concentration that reflects ecosystem constraints from concentration that reflects choices, so that its consequences can be understood and addressed.

Explore the data: Consolidation Watch Dashboard


Publications

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

In our SIGMETRICS 2023 paper, with Rashna Kumar, Sana Asif, and Elise Lee, we presented the first large-scale, longitudinal study of third-party dependency and centralization across the web, examining how reliance on a small number of providers varies across countries and over time.

📄 Paper

Of Choices and Control — A Comparative Analysis of Government Hosting

In our IMC 2024 paper, with Rashna Kumar, Esteban Carisimo, Lukas De Angelis Riva, Mauricio Buzzone, Ihsan Ayyub Qazi, and Mariano G. Beiro, we examined how governments around the world host their web presence — revealing the extent to which public services depend on commercial cloud and CDN infrastructure, and how this varies with national policy and economic context.

📄 Paper

The Centralization of a Decentralized Video Platform — A first Characterization of PeerTube

In our CCR 2025 paper, with Michael Polinski, Richard Jo, and Kevin McAfee, we studied PeerTube — a federated, decentralized alternative to YouTube — and found that even platforms explicitly designed to resist consolidation exhibit significant centralization in practice.

📄 Paper

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

In our NINeS 2026 paper, with Rashna Kumar, Marcel Flores, we present the first methodology to systematically infer CDN replica selection strategies at global scale, enabling third-party visibility into opaque steering mechanisms. Our findings highlight replica selection as a sociotechnical risk: opaque steering decisions amplify the effects of resolver consolidation and shape the Internet’s future resilience and control.

📄 Paper


People

Lead & PI

Students

Collaborators