Just 30 firms dominate the Internet

THE INTERNET has undergone radical infrastructural and economic changes in the past two years, leading to the dominance of just 30 large companies, according to a major study from Arbor Networks and the University of Michigan.

The two year-long research analysed more than 256 exabytes of web traffic across 110 large cable operators, transit backbones, regional networks and content providers across the globe, and found that 30 "hyper giants" account for 30 per cent of all traffic.

Arbor Networks said in the 2009 Internet Observatory Report that five years ago Internet traffic was fairly well spread out globally across tens of thousands of enterprise managed web sites and servers, but that content today has moved to just a handful of very large hosting, cloud and content providers.

Craig Labovitz, the firm's chief scientist, said that half of Internet traffic in 2007 was generated by between 5,000 and 10,000 companies. Since then, however, a major aggregation of content has meant that just 150 companies are now responsible for the same amount of traffic on a daily basis, led by household names such as Google, Yahoo and Facebook.

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"The first 12 years of the Internet was all about getting homes and businesses connected. That was the technology and that was the story. Now connectivity is ubiquitous and prices are falling and the innovation is happening not there but in content - getting it closer to the consumer and business," said Labovitz.
"As content is getting faster and better quality it will change the face of the Internet, which is exciting for enterprises and consumers. We are entering the second era of the Internet."

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