10 February 2026
We created the Concentration section of Pulse as a way to track the concentration and consolidation of the Internet services market over the long term. We know that this topic is vital to understanding and advocating for an Internet that’s reliable and available. With this update, our goal is to simplify and streamline the page so we can move it to the new Pulse platform.
What's New
Updated data components for easier comparison
We track 6 key Internet building blocks and measure the concentration at different sample sizes. In the old version, you had to toggle between 3 scales, which made it difficult to compare at a glance. We’ve reduced this to just the top 1,000 websites and what we call “all” websites (based on a sample of 10 million sites), along with a scale that interprets the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) value. It should be easier to compare across the sample sizes. We hope this will provoke some useful research questions.
Improvements
Content updates to clarify the purpose
The earlier version of the page was confusing to users. People would land on this thinking they would see a global picture of ISP market concentration, but this is a very different project from the data we have on the country pages. To clear this up, we’ve shortened and focused the introduction, added a longer description to the text at the bottom of the page, and explained some more of the data in context. We’re eager to hear your feedback—if it’s still not clear, don’t hesitate to contact us.
Simplified the interactions by showing everything by default
Now you can see data from both sample sizes at a glance, no more toggling or switching between tabs. We added simple bar graphs to the building blocks components to make it easier to compare. There’s less data in the interface, but it should be easier to understand what’s there. Everything that was in the old version is available in the Pulse API.
Other Updates
Streamlined the output by simplifying model and sample sizes
We used to show both the HHI and the Gini Index of the market share distributions. While these indices are complementary, we decided to focus on the HHI, which translates most readily into a picture of service market share concentration. We also removed the country market share data from the page itself. It needs so much interpretation and context that we decided, for now, it can be made available via the API, where people interested in this data can still use it, but it won’t clutter the page for people who just want to data to ask questions about potential points of failure in the Internet’s building blocks.
Added a call to action — you can help us develop this focus area
This page is more a laboratory than an advocacy resource, but we know the topic is extremely valuable. Recent infrastructure outages make it more urgent than ever that we have reliable data that helps us determine what “good” looks like, in the balance between economies of scale and risky consolidation.