[Colloquium] Synthia Wang MS Presentation/May 15, 2023

[Megan Woodward]

This is an announcement of Synthia Wang's MS Presentation
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Candidate: Synthia Wang

Date: Monday, May 15, 2023

Time: 11 am CST

Location: JCL 298

M.S. Paper Title: 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
a variety of potential threats to the Internet, including susceptibility to outages, failures,
and potential censorship by providers. Increasingly, an outage from a single organization
can create widespread disruption across a large number of sites and services. Although the
consolidation towards a small set of providers have been noted for several years, the degree
of consolidation over time has not been fully quantified. As such, this paper aims to quantify
consolidation in terms of popular domains’ reliance on a small set of organizations for 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 10,000 websites. The findings are
surprising and somewhat alarming. We find that over 75% of the top 10,000 domains rely
on only a single organization for hosting authoritative DNS resolution. Furthermore, two
organizations, Cloudflare and Amazon, are the sole host of DNS name servers for over 37% of
these popular domains. In terms of web hosting, we find that 61% of index pages and many
external page resources for the top 10,000 websites are hosted by only five organizations:
Cloudflare, Amazon, Akamai, Fastly, and Google.

Advisors: Nick Feamster

Committee Members: Marshini Chetty, Junchen Jiang, and Nick Feamster






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