Related papers: Hosting Industry Centralization and Consolidation
Heightened interest from nation states to perform content censorship make it evermore critical to identify the impact of censorship efforts on the Internet. We undertake a study of Internet architecture, capturing the state of Internet…
The extent and importance of cloud computing is rapidly increasing due to the ever increasing demand for internet services and communications. Instead of building individual information technology infrastructure to host databases or…
Ever since the web began, the number of websites has been growing exponentially. These websites cover an ever-increasing range of online services that fill a variety of social and economic functions across a growing range of industries. Yet…
This paper examines free content websites (FCWs) and premium content websites (PCWs) in different countries, comparing them to general websites. The focus is on the distribution of malicious websites and their correlation with the national…
Recent years have witnessed growing consolidation of web operations. For example, the majority of web traffic now originates from a few organizations, and even micro-websites often choose to host on large pre-existing cloud infrastructures.…
Almost all popular Internet services are hosted in a select set of countries, forcing other nations to rely on international connectivity to access them. We infer instances where traffic towards a large portion of a country is serviced by a…
In this study, we report on techniques and analyses that enable us to capture Internet-wide activity at individual IP address-level granularity by relying on server logs of a large commercial content delivery network (CDN) that serves close…
With 24 official EU and many additional languages, multilingualism in Europe and an inclusive Digital Single Market can only be enabled through Language Technologies (LTs). European LT business is dominated by hundreds of SMEs and a few…
The presence of third-party tracking on websites has become customary. However, our understanding of the third-party ecosystem is still very rudimentary. We examine third-party trackers from a geographical perspective, observing the…
Most online communications rely on DNS to map domain names to their hosting IP address(es). Previous work has shown that DNS-based network interference is widespread due to the unencrypted and unauthenticated nature of the original DNS…
Airbnb, an online marketplace for accommodations, has experienced a staggering growth accompanied by intense debates and scattered regulations around the world. Current discourses, however, are largely focused on opinions rather than…
Let's Encrypt is a new entrant in the Certificate Authority ecosystem that offers free and automated certificate signing. It is visionary in its commitment to Certificate Transparency. In this paper, we shed light on the adoption patterns…
Is Google Search a monopoly with gatekeeping power? Regulators from the US, UK, and Europe have argued that it is based on the assumption that Google Search dominates the market for horizontal (a.k.a. "general") web search. Google disputes…
Concentration phenomena concern the ICT market. Though the regulatory action has been active mainly in the telecom network operators industry, even more significant worldwide concentration phenomena affect other industries. The market of…
The last decade has witnessed rapid proliferation of cloud computing. While even the smallest distributed programs (with 3-5 actions) produce many unanticipated error cases due to concurrency involved, it seems short of a miracle these…
Domain names are key assets for organisation. They anchor an organisation's online presence and reputation, and serve as linking pin for web services and, e.g., email. Consequently, a malicious takeover of a domain can lead to significant…
The evolution of Web and service technologies has led to a wide landscape of standards and protocols for interaction between loosely coupled software components. Examples range from Web applications, mashups, apps, and mobile devices to…
Cloud services are becoming increasingly popular: 60\% of information technology spending in 2016 was Cloud-based, and the size of the public Cloud service market will reach \$236B by 2020. To ensure reliable operation of the Cloud…
Online platforms have completely transformed American social life. They have democratized publication, overthrown old gatekeepers, and given ordinary Americans a fresh voice in politics. But the system is beginning to falter. Control over…
Cloud providers' support for network evasion techniques that misrepresent the server's domain name is more prevalent than previously believed, which has serious implications for security and privacy due to the reliance on domain names in…