The Home Advantage Index 2026: Websites Didn't Move Abroad, They Moved to the Edge — and the Index Fell in 70 of 78 Countries
How much of each country's own namespace is hosted at home, mailed by a domestic operator and served by a domestic DNS provider? We measured all three layers for 78 national country-code TLDs plus .eu: 29 hosting crawls from April 2023 to September 2026, and 12 MX and 10 NS crawls from April 2025. Domestic hosting is not losing to foreign data centres but to the edge: the median share of a country's websites behind anycast front doors doubled from 11% to 23%, almost all of them run by US companies, while the home share of located websites barely moved. With US-headquartered operators gaining mail share in 76 countries and DNS share in 74, the index — a descriptive composite of domestic control, not a measure of sovereignty or resilience — fell in 70 of 78 countries in seventeen months, from a median of 42.1 to 38.1. Iran, the United States, Japan and Germany keep most of their namespaces at home; among the 30 largest, Mexico, Canada and India keep the least. For policymakers working on digital sovereignty, registries, hosting and DNS operators, and Internet measurement researchers.