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An Empirical View on Consolidation of the Web

Published:12 February 2022Publication History
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Abstract

The majority of Web content is delivered by only a few companies that provide Content Delivery Infrastructuress (CDIss) such as Content Delivery Networkss (CDNss) and cloud hosts. Due to increasing concerns about trends of centralization, empirical studies on the extent and implications of resulting Internet consolidation are necessary. Thus, we present an empirical view on consolidation of the Web by leveraging datasets from two different measurement platforms. We first analyze Web consolidation around CDIs at the level of landing webpages, before narrowing down the analysis to a level of embedded page resources. The datasets cover 1(a) longitudinal measurements of DNS records for 166.5 M Web domains over five years, 1(b) measurements of DNS records for Alexa Top 1 M over a month and (2) measurements of page loads and renders for 4.3 M webpages, which include data on 392.3 M requested resources. We then define CDIs penetration as the ratio of CDI-hosted objects to all measured objects, which we use to quantify consolidation around CDIs. We observe that CDI penetration has close to doubled since 2015, reaching a lower bound of 15% for all .com, .net, and .org Web domains as of January 2020. Overall, we find a set of six CDIss to deliver the majority of content across all datasets, with these six CDIss being responsible for more than 80% of all 221.9 M CDI-delivered resources (56.6% of all resources in total). We find high dependencies of Web content on a small group of CDIss, in particular, for fonts, ads, and trackers, as well as JavaScript resources such as jQuery. We further observe CDIss to play important roles in rolling out IPv6 and TLS 1.3 support. Overall, these observations indicate a potential oligopoly, which brings both benefits but also risks to the future of the Web.

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  1. An Empirical View on Consolidation of the Web

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            cover image ACM Transactions on Internet Technology
            ACM Transactions on Internet Technology  Volume 22, Issue 3
            August 2022
            631 pages
            ISSN:1533-5399
            EISSN:1557-6051
            DOI:10.1145/3498359
            • Editor:
            • Ling Liu
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            Publication History

            • Published: 12 February 2022
            • Accepted: 1 November 2021
            • Revised: 1 September 2021
            • Received: 1 March 2021
            Published in toit Volume 22, Issue 3

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