Market Concentration

Sharing service infrastructure can enable network participants to connect with each other to build and sustain the Internet. But the Internet is becoming increasingly reliant on a small number of services and business that provide that infrastructure.

We use a common measure of market concentration to track some of those trends and patterns among the Internet's main building blocks over time, to see where deep dependencies could create points of failure.

Help turn this into advocacy data

There's still no clear way to measure the distinction between healthy economies of scale and Internet centralization. All the data from 2019 onward is in the Pulse API. If you'd like to help turn this into insights for advocacy, contact [email protected] or apply for a Pulse Fellowship.

Tracking Internet building blocks

Using the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) to track each of 6 core Internet technology markets. Learn more about the data for this focus area.

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)

Networks of servers that cache frequently accessed Internet content in locations that are geographically closer to the users.

  • 3462
    Top 1,000 websites
  • 6652
    All websites

Top-level domains

Internet domain names are hierarchical, with the highest level known as a top-level domain (TLD). TLDs are managed by registries.

  • 2729
    Top 1,000 websites
  • 2118
    All websites

SSL certificates

Verify website ownership and enable encryption of Internet traffic. A range of providers with good security practices makes the web more secure.

  • 2451
    Top 1,000 websites
  • 4598
    All websites

DNS servers

The switchboards of the Internet, making sure domain names, IP addresses, and other records match up, so users go where they mean to.

  • 2637
    Top 1,000 websites
  • 635
    All websites

Data centers

Physical places where hardware and software can support many websites at once, from the same location.

  • 2409
    Top 1,000 websites
  • 523
    All websites

Web hosting

Organizations that provide infrastructure that allows websites to be accessed by users, on behalf of website owners.

  • 1308
    Top 1,000 websites
  • 276
    All websites

Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) scale

Low
Below 1500
Moderate
1500 to 2500
High
2500 to 5000
Extremely high
Above 5000

HHI values range from 0 to 10,000, and provide a measure of market concentration. We use popular websites as our markets and marketshare data gathered through surveys by W3Techs. Markets with HHI values over 2,500 are considered highly concentrated.

Internet service concentration since 2021

Showing data across 6 core Internet technologies, tracking change over time.

Concentration across all websites

Concentration across top 1000 websites

Why we track concentration of Internet services

The original design of the Internet emphasized decentralization. This means that infrastructure, services, and decisions are localized and diverse. Interoperability has been fundamental to how the Internet has evolved and why its many uses and innovations have flourished. But innovation might be concentrated on a small set of proprietary platforms.

Could our increasing reliance on just a few companies in the Internet economy create critical dependencies, or make them too big to fail?

This research explores consolidation in the Internet economy, guided by the central question: Are there trends of consolidation in the Internet economy, and if so, how will consolidation impact the Internet's technical evolution and use?

Consolidation of these services can start to affect users' ability to choose between them, and a reduction in choice can have a deeper and broader impact, depending on economic domain, geographical region, and regulatory factors.

In this work, we aim to capture data that helps us understand the balance between economies of scale and centralization. We partnered with W3Techs to generate these measurements. They provide an overview of their methodology and a more detailed FAQ.

You can also read the 2019 report on consolidation in the Internet economy, which inspired the original version of this page.

Get all the data in the Pulse API

You'll find all the data we use on this page in the Pulse API, along with everything that was on the earlier version of the page. This includes a calculation of these measurements using the Gini coefficient, and market share by country, both weighted and unweighted. If something is missing, get in touch

Read more on the Pulse blog