Posts tagged "concentration"

3 posts found.

September 23, 2026 34 min read

How Much of the Web Runs on Virginia's Grid? 3.6% of 290 Million Websites — and Nearly Half Answer From No Single Grid at All

Data centers are fighting over power, and Northern Virginia is the prize. We located every address behind the website record of every registrable domain in 29 crawls, April 2023 to September 2026 — by cloud region tag, geofeed, geoIP and 213 speed-of-light RTT measurements — and mapped it to a metro and a grid operator. Northern Virginia serves 3.6% of the world's websites, more than any country except the United States and Germany, and one in five of those we can place in the US. Its share has not grown: it fell for live sites, while its biggest tenant became a domain-for-sale marketplace. The fastest-growing place on the map is no place: 47% of websites now answer from anycast and CDN front doors, up from 31%. For energy and policy reporters, utility and grid analysts, cloud-resilience engineers and Internet measurement researchers.

September 22, 2026 35 min read

How Many Computers Host the Web? 290 Million Websites, 12.7 Million Addresses, and the 1,025 That Answer for Half of Them

We counted every IPv4 address behind the website record of every registrable domain in 29 full crawls of the DomainsProject corpus, April 2023 to September 2026. The web grew 71% (169.3M to 289.7M websites); the addresses it answers from grew 16% (10.9M to 12.7M). Half of all websites now answer from just 1,025 addresses, down from 3,908, and two GoDaddy addresses alone serve 23.9 million. But the concentration at the top is the parking layer: the live web still needs ~17,700 addresses to reach half its sites, while its middle is thinning — its dedicated-address share fell by a quarter and half the live web now sits on 11 networks, not 20. The annual physical-layer companion to the Internet Concentration Index, for network operators, courts and regulators weighing IP blocking, privacy engineers, and Internet measurement researchers.

June 27, 2026 23 min read

Who Controls the Internet in 2026? Four Core Layers, Four Different Owners, and a 92% Single Point of Failure

The first edition of the Internet Concentration Index: a synthesis of four full-corpus, typed-DNS censuses of the same ~3-billion-name dataset, measuring who controls the Internet's core layers one domain at a time. DNS, email, cloud hosting and the CDN/proxy edge each have a different owner — GoDaddy, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare — no single company controls all four, the enterprise giant everyone names (Microsoft) is nearly invisible by domain count, and 92.5% of delegated domains sit on a single point of failure. For policymakers, security teams, and anyone who has watched one outage take down half the web.