Measuring the Consolidation of DNS and Web Hosting Providers

Abstract

Despite the Internet's continued growth, it increasingly depends on a small set of service providers to support Domain Name System (DNS) and web content hosting. This trend poses many potential threats including susceptibility to outages, failures, and potential censorship by providers. This paper aims to quantify consolidation in terms of popular domains' reliance on a small set of organizations for both DNS and web hosting. We highlight the extent to which a set of relatively few platforms host the authoritative name servers and web content for the top million websites. Our results show that both DNS and web hosting are concentrated, with Cloudflare and Amazon hosting over $30\%$ of the domains for both services. With the addition of Akamai, Fastly, and Google, these five organizations host $60\%$ of index pages in the Tranco top 10K, as well as the majority of external page resources. These trends are consistent across six different global vantage points, indicating that consolidation is happening globally and popular organizations can influence users' online experience across the world.