Internet Depends on Too Few Infrastructure Providers: Researcher
Citing the recent Cloudflare outage, which temporarily disrupted access to numerous websites, Internet Society researcher Amreesh Phokeer wrote last week that the internet's dependence on a very small number of infrastructure providers shows that "when one of them sneezes, the…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
entire Internet catches a cold." Since June 2021, the concentration of the content delivery network (CDN) market has increased steadily, Phokeer said. While the internet was based around a principle of decentralization, the infrastructure that keeps it running today, such as cloud computing, hosting and content delivery, is provided by just a few companies, he said. Large providers combining edge hosting, security, CDN and domain name system services into one stack may be efficient and convenient, but it "breaks a critical resilience principle, which is the 'separation of concerns.' "