The Concentration of the Internet

It is time to start asking important questions.For whom is the Internet? To whom does it belong? Are we protecting it properly?Do we have reason to? 

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Did you know that 2% of the domain names that make up the Internet are found at a single IP address?  That’s two million domains in a single location!  In fact, as you can see by examining a compilation of data on more than 120 million domains, this trend of high-concentration plays itself out in nearly all aspects of the Internet.

In addition to domains being highly concentrated within certain IP addresses, they are highly concentrated amongst certain owners as well.  For example, a study has revealed a list of the Internet’s top 100 web hosting companieswith Arizona’s GoDaddy Ltd. at the very top, hosting 20 or so million domains.  Number two, a company in Germany called PlusLine Systemhas GmbH, only has two million.  Again, ownership is highly concentrated.  The same can be said for zones.  Whereas  86 million domains are .coms, only 13 million are .nets, 8 million are .orgs, and 5.4 million are .infos.  All the remaining zones consist of a small fraction of these numbers of domains.  Networks and their domain-distribution show the same concentration effect; the second-ranking network (64.X.X.X) has fewer than a third of the 15 million domains that make up the class ‘A’ network (68.X.X.X). 

Perhaps the key to understanding this pattern of high-concentration is embedded in frequency with which various languages are used in various domains.  Of more than 120 million domains for which data has been compiled, 71.5% have English as the primary language used.  Chinese was used in only 6.9%, Spanish in 3.7%, French in 3.1%, and Japanese in a mere 2.6%.  Because these figures break the expectations set up by the percentage of the world’s population that speaks each of these languages—because the Internet’s content is so biased toward English speakers—one must ask if there is a connection between this bias and other trends of unbalanced concentration. 

These statistics are available and updated on a daily basis at http://www.webboar.com.  Check them out, keep yourself informed. 

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