Independent Submission M. McFadden
Internet Draft Internet policy advisors, ltd
October 24, 2022
Intended status: Informational
Expires: April 23, 2023
A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation
draft-mcfadden-consolidation-taxonomy-00.txt
Status of this Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that
other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-
Drafts.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six
months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents
at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as
reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at
http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt
The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at
http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html
This Internet-Draft will expire on April 23, 2023.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2022 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
(http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
publication of this document. Please review these documents
carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with
respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this
document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in
Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without
warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License.
McFadden Expires April 23, 2021 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
Abstract
This document contributes to the ongoing discussion surrounding
Internet consolidation. At recent IETF meetings discussions about
Internet consolidation revealed that different perspectives gave
completely different views of what consolidation means. While we use
the term consolidation to refer to the process of increasing control
over Internet infrastructure and services by a small set of
organizations, it is clear that that control is expressed through
economic, network traffic and protocol concerns. As a contribution
to the discussion surrounding consolidation, this document attempts
to provide a taxonomy of Internet consolidation with the goal of
adding clarity to a complex discussion.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction - Why a Taxonomy?.................................2
2. Background to Consolidation Issues.............................3
3. Economic Consolidation.........................................4
3.1. Economic Revenue Consolidation............................4
3.2. Economic Flow Consolidation...............................5
4. Traffic and Infrastructure Consolidation.......................5
5. Architectural Consolidation....................................6
5.1. The Rise of Intermediaries................................6
5.2. Vertical Architectural Consolidation......................7
5.3. Standards Development.....................................7
6. Service and Application Consolidation..........................8
7. Security Considerations........................................8
8. IANA Considerations............................................8
9. References.....................................................9
9.1. Informative References....................................9
10. Acknowledgments..............................................10
1. Introduction - Why a Taxonomy?
Internet consolidation has been under discussion for the last
several years. The 2019 Internet Society's "Global Internet Report:
Consolidation and the Internet Economy" highlighted issues on this
topic and kicked started a series of discussions and publications
around consolidation. The DINRG Workshop on Centralization took
place in June of 2021 and was reported on at IETF 114. Furthermore,
a draft for the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) discussed issues
of economic and technical consolidation. [1] Despite community
interest, the draft expired without further work or publication.
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 2]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
Several other contributions have focused on responses to
consolidation. However, the report from the DINRG Workshop makes
clear that there are different "categories of centralization." This
draft does not attempt to propose responses to centralization,
instead it attempts to build upon the Workshop's summary of
"categories of centralization" with a goal of supporting future work
and discussion.
2. Background to Consolidation Issues
Internet consolidation is "the process of increasing control over
internet infrastructure and services by a small set of
organizations." [2] Economy of scale is the driving force behind
consolidation because markets naturally consolidate when economies
of scale come into play.
The DINRG Workshop Report notes that:
"- the economy of scale enables one to generate the same service
outcome with far lower production costs, and consume fewer resources
for each instance of the service transaction.
- a large user pool produces big data which helps improve service
customization for each user, letting bigger companies gain an edge
over smaller competitors.
- centralized application developments reduce the number of
platforms, hence substantially reduce the cost in development and
maintenance, and circumvent interoperability issues. Consolidated
development and operational efforts also help mitigate technical
expertise shortages.
- most of all, monopoly players can dictate to the market the terms
of the service and the service price bought to the market, which
causes longer term stagnation of the market and increased
inefficiency within the market, which acts as a drag on further
innovation."
The current consolidation and centralization of control and
operation of Internet infrastructure and services was not an
original design goal. In fact, RFC1958 says:
"This allows for uniform and relatively seamless operations in a
competitive, multi-vendor, multi-provider public network."
and later,
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 3]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
"Heterogeneity is inevitable and must be supported by design."[3]
Much of the discussion surrounding consolidation focuses on Internet
services, applications and data.[4] However, contributions to the
discussion of consolidation have also addressed economic, traffic
and architectural consolidation. In recognition of this, a taxonomy
with four main categories is proposed:
- Economic Consolidation
- Traffic and Infrastructure Consolidation
- Architectural Consolidation
- Service and Application Consolidation
3. Economic Consolidation
The Internet Society Report on Internet Consolidation suggests that
the Internet's economy is defined as the economic activities that
either support the Internet or are fundamentally dependent on the
Internet's existence.
As a result, economic consolidation on the Internet refers to the
effects of market consolidation on competition and the economic
power of a small set of companies that dominate economic activity in
the Internet. There are two aspects to economic consolidation on the
Internet.
Economic consolidation means that a small number of companies
dominate the marketplace and hence, the revenues gathered from the
use of the Internet.
Economic consolidation also means that a small number of companies
control the flow of capital among enterprises that provide services
on the Internet.
3.1. Economic Revenue Consolidation
One of the two aspects of economic consolidation is the generation
of revenue by a small number of enterprises. As an example, Amazon
accounts for more than 45% of all online retail spending in the
United States. Alibaba is estimated to have 60% or the electronic
commerce market in China. Meta - including Facebook, Messenger,
WhatsApp and Instagram - dominates social media and messaging
holding four of the world's top six social media platforms. [6]
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 4]
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In each of these cases, a very small number of companies operate
extremely popular services, concentrating revenue generation into
those companies. In fact, the popularity of these services is so
great that value is created by adding other, complementary services
onto the base they provide. The dominant services thus control the
foundation upon which other revenue streams are built. [7]
3.2. Economic Flow Consolidation
In addition to revenue generation, the very large application layer
companies (Alphabet, Amazon, Tencent, Meta and Alibaba) control how
money and capital moves through enterprises providing services on
the Internet.
We have seen that embedded intermediaries that have substantial
power can implement platforms that provide services to downstream
consumers as well as upstream sources of content and applications.
As the controlling intermediary for those services and applications,
these large companies are also able to dictate how economic flows
move between consumers and providers of applications and services.
Regulators and policy makers often are concerned about the enormous
market power that these huge intermediaries have, but refrain from
imposing controls or sanctions on the grounds that consumers get
significant benefits when platform operators use upstream revenues
to subsidize downstream services.
4. Traffic and Infrastructure Consolidation
A significant majority of the Internet's traffic is delivered from
very large content services including Google, Amazon and Facebook.
These companies naturally attempt to provide the best possible
service for their customers - including perceived speed of content
delivery - these content services seek to establish connections
directly with the companies providing access to the network. The
result is a "flattening" of the Internet's traditional topology.
In fact, a recent study shows that these large services can reach
more than 76% of the Internet without having to traverse traditional
Tier 1 and Tier 2 ISPs. Besides bringing benefits of low latency and
higher security to their uses, these large-scale networks are also
able to implement improvements and innovations in protocol design by
having far greater control over the elements of the infrastructure
being used to deliver services.
An empirical view of this consolidation in February of 2022 [8]
shows that the number of webpages that are hosted on these networks
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 5]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
has increased from 2015 to 2020 at a rate exceeding 80%. In looking
at data sources including TLD datasets and Alexa Top 1M datasets
only a small number of content delivery networks host the vast
majority of landing pages.
Centralization of this sort makes traffic filtering easier since
forcing a content network to block specific content (or worse,
blocking the content network entirely) would make a large amount of
the content unavailable. As these networks begin to migrate other
services to HTTP (for instance, DNS over HTTP), more than the web is
affected by the impacts of filtering by centralized content
services. In fact, blocking a content network entirely would block
all the content of the network, not just the content that was the
target of the filtering.
This happens at all layers. As an example at the application layer,
in 2021 Google and Apple were forced to remove applications created
by the Russian political opposition from their stores. The ability
of a government to influence the content network means that
centralization can lead to a reduction in the diversity of
information or services on the Internet.
As the content networks grow in scale, the networks themselves grow
to support the required network capacity. This sets up a feedback
look that drives market concentration toward the infrastructure
provided by the content networks. As these networks grow larger, it
becomes difficult for smaller networks and infrastructure providers
to compete with the economies of scale from which the large networks
benefit.
5. Architectural Consolidation
A third category of consolidation is the evolution of the Internet's
architecture to meet contemporary use cases and requirements. Early
descriptions of the Internet's architecture described heterogeneous
endpoints connected by neutral transports. The end-to-end principle
suggested that the transport of data between endpoints was provided
without much intervention. [10]
Two developments have led to architectural consolidation: the
emergence of intermediary services and the movement of transport
related code to the application layer.
5.1. The Rise of Intermediaries
In the first case, technologies like CDNs are built into the network
for the efficient delivery of content and services. The consumer is
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 6]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
largely unaware that the service or application is being hosted by
an organization other than they one they think they contacted.
Instead, content delivery is pushed as close to the consumer as
possible to ensure that the end-user experience is as optimal as
possible.
The result is a series of security, economic and policy concerns
associated with the small number of very large providers of these
intermediary services. However, in this section we only want to
consider the architectural issues specific to the use of
intermediaries.
5.2. Vertical Architectural Consolidation
The second case is vertical architectural consolidation. This is
where the companies that control the applications attempt to control
all aspects of the communication. For instance, the provider of the
browser may be the organization that the browser connects to. The
advantage of this kind of architectural consolidation is that it
allows the largest players to introduce technological innovation
more quickly than if multiple layers of the stack required
innovation in parallel.
With tools like DNS over HTTPS, we see applications taking control
of the infrastructure of transport in addition to providing an
application or service. Applications essentially provide their own
ecosystem (from centralized control of DNS services all the way to
the end-user experience).
5.3. Standards Development
Others have rightly observed that, in the current environment,
development of protocols and standards for the Internet is largely
confined to a small number of participants from a small number of
organizations. One trend is that the giant enterprises on the
Internet also dominate the development of protocols.
Having a small number of organizations controlling the
infrastructure of the Internet also means that innovative
technologies can be implemented quickly and at large-scale. In 2022,
a study in the ACM Transactions on Internet Technology found that
Google accounting for 60% of all TLS 1.3 secured resources. Some
other, large CDNs use TLS 1.3 almost exclusively. QUIC is also an
example of a new technology that profits from consolidation. Large
scale intermediaries can facilitate the deployment and adoption of
new standards because the decision for the adoption is propagated
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 7]
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across the infrastructure instead of through user adoption or
feature updates.
6. Service and Application Consolidation
Services and applications are those tools that users see when they
interact with the Internet. They take advantage of the
infrastructure (and, access) parts of the Internet's ecosystem.
According to the Internet Society's report on consolidation, "a
small number of companies operating some of the Internet's most
popular services dominate this market. Many of these companies act
as multi-sided markets or platforms, meaning they offer a base upon
which other applications, processes or technologies can be
developed."
By itself, Google holds 90% of the global search market, the number
one mobile operating system (Android), the top-user-generated video
platform and has more than 1.5 billion active users of its Gmail
email service. Google also has a map service, a public DNS resolver
service, a cloud service and a document store.
While twenty years ago, an application would simply rely on the
underlying operating system to provide its communications and
transport services, now applications and services do this for
themselves. This is a case of the intermediary or platform providing
the application integrating all the necessary components for
providing a service on the Internet.
7. Security Considerations
While this document does not describe a specific protocol, it does
discuss the evolving architecture of the Internet. Changes to the
Internet's architecture have direct and indirect implications for
the Internet's threat model. In another draft [20]REFERENCE, we
discuss how the evolution of the Internet has changed the threat
model. Specifically, the changes to the end-to-end model (see
section 4.2 above) have inserted new interfaces which must be
reflected in security considerations for new protocols.
8. IANA Considerations
This memo contains no instructions or requests for IANA. Conclusions
This document seeks to rekindle and restart the discussion on
consolidation. As argued above, Internet consolidation is happening
at different places and different layers of the Internet. Though
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there has been interest in the Internet consolidation in the past,
now is the time to start the discussions again.
9. References
9.1. Informative References
[1] Considerations on Internet Consolidation and the Internet
Architecture [draft-arkko-iab-internet-consolidation-02].
[2] IBID
[3] Draft Report of DINRG Workshop on Centralization in the
Internet, June 3, 2021, Huitema, Huston, Kutscher, Zhang,
https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/114/materials/slides-114-
dinrg-draft-report-of-dinrg-workshop-on-centralization-in-the-
internet-01.pdf
[4] Design Expectations vs. Deployment Reality in Protocol
Development Workshop 2019, Internet Architecture Board
https://www.iab.org/activities/workshops/dedr-
workshop/position-papers/
[5] Consolidation In the Internet Economy, Internet Society, 2019.
https://future.internetsociety.org/2019/consolidation-in-the-
internet-economy
[6] IBID page 5.
[7] Journal of Cyber Policy, Volume 5, Issue 1 (2020) Special
Issue: Consolidation of the Internet
(https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rcyb20/5/1)
[8] An Empirical View on Consolidation of the Web, Trinh Viet
Doan, Roland van Rijswijk-Deij, Oliver Hohlfeld, and Vaibhav
Bajpai. 2022. ACM Trans. Internet Technol. 22, 3, Article 70
(February 2022),
https://vaibhavbajpai.com/documents/papers/proceedings/web-
consolidation-toit-2022.pdf
[9] IBID page 70:3
[10] RFC 8890, The Internet is for End Users. Nottingham, Mark.
August 2020. https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8890
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10. Acknowledgments
Many thanks to all who discussed this with us in DINRG in 2021 and
2022.
This document was prepared using 2-Word-v2.0.template.dot.
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Authors' Addresses
Mark McFadden
Internet policy advisors ltd
Chepstow, Wales, UK
Email: mark@internetpolicyadvisors.com
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 11]
Independent Submission M. McFadden
Internet Draft Internet policy advisors, ltd
October 24, 2022
Intended status: Informational
Expires: April 23, 2023
A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation
draft-mcfadden-consolidation-taxonomy-00.txt
Status of this Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that
other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-
Drafts.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six
months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents
at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as
reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at
http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt
The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at
http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html
This Internet-Draft will expire on April 23, 2023.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2022 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
(http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
publication of this document. Please review these documents
carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with
respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this
document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in
Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without
warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License.
McFadden Expires April 23, 2021 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
Abstract
This document contributes to the ongoing discussion surrounding
Internet consolidation. At recent IETF meetings discussions about
Internet consolidation revealed that different perspectives gave
completely different views of what consolidation means. While we use
the term consolidation to refer to the process of increasing control
over Internet infrastructure and services by a small set of
organizations, it is clear that that control is expressed through
economic, network traffic and protocol concerns. As a contribution
to the discussion surrounding consolidation, this document attempts
to provide a taxonomy of Internet consolidation with the goal of
adding clarity to a complex discussion.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction - Why a Taxonomy?.................................2
2. Background to Consolidation Issues.............................3
3. Economic Consolidation.........................................4
3.1. Economic Revenue Consolidation............................4
3.2. Economic Flow Consolidation...............................5
4. Traffic and Infrastructure Consolidation.......................5
5. Architectural Consolidation....................................6
5.1. The Rise of Intermediaries................................6
5.2. Vertical Architectural Consolidation......................7
5.3. Standards Development.....................................7
6. Service and Application Consolidation..........................8
7. Security Considerations........................................8
8. IANA Considerations............................................8
9. References.....................................................9
9.1. Informative References....................................9
10. Acknowledgments..............................................10
1. Introduction - Why a Taxonomy?
Internet consolidation has been under discussion for the last
several years. The 2019 Internet Society's "Global Internet Report:
Consolidation and the Internet Economy" highlighted issues on this
topic and kicked started a series of discussions and publications
around consolidation. The DINRG Workshop on Centralization took
place in June of 2021 and was reported on at IETF 114. Furthermore,
a draft for the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) discussed issues
of economic and technical consolidation. [1] Despite community
interest, the draft expired without further work or publication.
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 2]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
Several other contributions have focused on responses to
consolidation. However, the report from the DINRG Workshop makes
clear that there are different "categories of centralization." This
draft does not attempt to propose responses to centralization,
instead it attempts to build upon the Workshop's summary of
"categories of centralization" with a goal of supporting future work
and discussion.
2. Background to Consolidation Issues
Internet consolidation is "the process of increasing control over
internet infrastructure and services by a small set of
organizations." [2] Economy of scale is the driving force behind
consolidation because markets naturally consolidate when economies
of scale come into play.
The DINRG Workshop Report notes that:
"- the economy of scale enables one to generate the same service
outcome with far lower production costs, and consume fewer resources
for each instance of the service transaction.
- a large user pool produces big data which helps improve service
customization for each user, letting bigger companies gain an edge
over smaller competitors.
- centralized application developments reduce the number of
platforms, hence substantially reduce the cost in development and
maintenance, and circumvent interoperability issues. Consolidated
development and operational efforts also help mitigate technical
expertise shortages.
- most of all, monopoly players can dictate to the market the terms
of the service and the service price bought to the market, which
causes longer term stagnation of the market and increased
inefficiency within the market, which acts as a drag on further
innovation."
The current consolidation and centralization of control and
operation of Internet infrastructure and services was not an
original design goal. In fact, RFC1958 says:
"This allows for uniform and relatively seamless operations in a
competitive, multi-vendor, multi-provider public network."
and later,
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 3]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
"Heterogeneity is inevitable and must be supported by design."[3]
Much of the discussion surrounding consolidation focuses on Internet
services, applications and data.[4] However, contributions to the
discussion of consolidation have also addressed economic, traffic
and architectural consolidation. In recognition of this, a taxonomy
with four main categories is proposed:
- Economic Consolidation
- Traffic and Infrastructure Consolidation
- Architectural Consolidation
- Service and Application Consolidation
3. Economic Consolidation
The Internet Society Report on Internet Consolidation suggests that
the Internet's economy is defined as the economic activities that
either support the Internet or are fundamentally dependent on the
Internet's existence.
As a result, economic consolidation on the Internet refers to the
effects of market consolidation on competition and the economic
power of a small set of companies that dominate economic activity in
the Internet. There are two aspects to economic consolidation on the
Internet.
Economic consolidation means that a small number of companies
dominate the marketplace and hence, the revenues gathered from the
use of the Internet.
Economic consolidation also means that a small number of companies
control the flow of capital among enterprises that provide services
on the Internet.
3.1. Economic Revenue Consolidation
One of the two aspects of economic consolidation is the generation
of revenue by a small number of enterprises. As an example, Amazon
accounts for more than 45% of all online retail spending in the
United States. Alibaba is estimated to have 60% or the electronic
commerce market in China. Meta - including Facebook, Messenger,
WhatsApp and Instagram - dominates social media and messaging
holding four of the world's top six social media platforms. [6]
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 4]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
In each of these cases, a very small number of companies operate
extremely popular services, concentrating revenue generation into
those companies. In fact, the popularity of these services is so
great that value is created by adding other, complementary services
onto the base they provide. The dominant services thus control the
foundation upon which other revenue streams are built. [7]
3.2. Economic Flow Consolidation
In addition to revenue generation, the very large application layer
companies (Alphabet, Amazon, Tencent, Meta and Alibaba) control how
money and capital moves through enterprises providing services on
the Internet.
We have seen that embedded intermediaries that have substantial
power can implement platforms that provide services to downstream
consumers as well as upstream sources of content and applications.
As the controlling intermediary for those services and applications,
these large companies are also able to dictate how economic flows
move between consumers and providers of applications and services.
Regulators and policy makers often are concerned about the enormous
market power that these huge intermediaries have, but refrain from
imposing controls or sanctions on the grounds that consumers get
significant benefits when platform operators use upstream revenues
to subsidize downstream services.
4. Traffic and Infrastructure Consolidation
A significant majority of the Internet's traffic is delivered from
very large content services including Google, Amazon and Facebook.
These companies naturally attempt to provide the best possible
service for their customers - including perceived speed of content
delivery - these content services seek to establish connections
directly with the companies providing access to the network. The
result is a "flattening" of the Internet's traditional topology.
In fact, a recent study shows that these large services can reach
more than 76% of the Internet without having to traverse traditional
Tier 1 and Tier 2 ISPs. Besides bringing benefits of low latency and
higher security to their uses, these large-scale networks are also
able to implement improvements and innovations in protocol design by
having far greater control over the elements of the infrastructure
being used to deliver services.
An empirical view of this consolidation in February of 2022 [8]
shows that the number of webpages that are hosted on these networks
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 5]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
has increased from 2015 to 2020 at a rate exceeding 80%. In looking
at data sources including TLD datasets and Alexa Top 1M datasets
only a small number of content delivery networks host the vast
majority of landing pages.
Centralization of this sort makes traffic filtering easier since
forcing a content network to block specific content (or worse,
blocking the content network entirely) would make a large amount of
the content unavailable. As these networks begin to migrate other
services to HTTP (for instance, DNS over HTTP), more than the web is
affected by the impacts of filtering by centralized content
services. In fact, blocking a content network entirely would block
all the content of the network, not just the content that was the
target of the filtering.
This happens at all layers. As an example at the application layer,
in 2021 Google and Apple were forced to remove applications created
by the Russian political opposition from their stores. The ability
of a government to influence the content network means that
centralization can lead to a reduction in the diversity of
information or services on the Internet.
As the content networks grow in scale, the networks themselves grow
to support the required network capacity. This sets up a feedback
look that drives market concentration toward the infrastructure
provided by the content networks. As these networks grow larger, it
becomes difficult for smaller networks and infrastructure providers
to compete with the economies of scale from which the large networks
benefit.
5. Architectural Consolidation
A third category of consolidation is the evolution of the Internet's
architecture to meet contemporary use cases and requirements. Early
descriptions of the Internet's architecture described heterogeneous
endpoints connected by neutral transports. The end-to-end principle
suggested that the transport of data between endpoints was provided
without much intervention. [10]
Two developments have led to architectural consolidation: the
emergence of intermediary services and the movement of transport
related code to the application layer.
5.1. The Rise of Intermediaries
In the first case, technologies like CDNs are built into the network
for the efficient delivery of content and services. The consumer is
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 6]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
largely unaware that the service or application is being hosted by
an organization other than they one they think they contacted.
Instead, content delivery is pushed as close to the consumer as
possible to ensure that the end-user experience is as optimal as
possible.
The result is a series of security, economic and policy concerns
associated with the small number of very large providers of these
intermediary services. However, in this section we only want to
consider the architectural issues specific to the use of
intermediaries.
5.2. Vertical Architectural Consolidation
The second case is vertical architectural consolidation. This is
where the companies that control the applications attempt to control
all aspects of the communication. For instance, the provider of the
browser may be the organization that the browser connects to. The
advantage of this kind of architectural consolidation is that it
allows the largest players to introduce technological innovation
more quickly than if multiple layers of the stack required
innovation in parallel.
With tools like DNS over HTTPS, we see applications taking control
of the infrastructure of transport in addition to providing an
application or service. Applications essentially provide their own
ecosystem (from centralized control of DNS services all the way to
the end-user experience).
5.3. Standards Development
Others have rightly observed that, in the current environment,
development of protocols and standards for the Internet is largely
confined to a small number of participants from a small number of
organizations. One trend is that the giant enterprises on the
Internet also dominate the development of protocols.
Having a small number of organizations controlling the
infrastructure of the Internet also means that innovative
technologies can be implemented quickly and at large-scale. In 2022,
a study in the ACM Transactions on Internet Technology found that
Google accounting for 60% of all TLS 1.3 secured resources. Some
other, large CDNs use TLS 1.3 almost exclusively. QUIC is also an
example of a new technology that profits from consolidation. Large
scale intermediaries can facilitate the deployment and adoption of
new standards because the decision for the adoption is propagated
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 7]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
across the infrastructure instead of through user adoption or
feature updates.
6. Service and Application Consolidation
Services and applications are those tools that users see when they
interact with the Internet. They take advantage of the
infrastructure (and, access) parts of the Internet's ecosystem.
According to the Internet Society's report on consolidation, "a
small number of companies operating some of the Internet's most
popular services dominate this market. Many of these companies act
as multi-sided markets or platforms, meaning they offer a base upon
which other applications, processes or technologies can be
developed."
By itself, Google holds 90% of the global search market, the number
one mobile operating system (Android), the top-user-generated video
platform and has more than 1.5 billion active users of its Gmail
email service. Google also has a map service, a public DNS resolver
service, a cloud service and a document store.
While twenty years ago, an application would simply rely on the
underlying operating system to provide its communications and
transport services, now applications and services do this for
themselves. This is a case of the intermediary or platform providing
the application integrating all the necessary components for
providing a service on the Internet.
7. Security Considerations
While this document does not describe a specific protocol, it does
discuss the evolving architecture of the Internet. Changes to the
Internet's architecture have direct and indirect implications for
the Internet's threat model. In another draft [20]REFERENCE, we
discuss how the evolution of the Internet has changed the threat
model. Specifically, the changes to the end-to-end model (see
section 4.2 above) have inserted new interfaces which must be
reflected in security considerations for new protocols.
8. IANA Considerations
This memo contains no instructions or requests for IANA. Conclusions
This document seeks to rekindle and restart the discussion on
consolidation. As argued above, Internet consolidation is happening
at different places and different layers of the Internet. Though
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 8]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
there has been interest in the Internet consolidation in the past,
now is the time to start the discussions again.
9. References
9.1. Informative References
[1] Considerations on Internet Consolidation and the Internet
Architecture [draft-arkko-iab-internet-consolidation-02].
[2] IBID
[3] Draft Report of DINRG Workshop on Centralization in the
Internet, June 3, 2021, Huitema, Huston, Kutscher, Zhang,
https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/114/materials/slides-114-
dinrg-draft-report-of-dinrg-workshop-on-centralization-in-the-
internet-01.pdf
[4] Design Expectations vs. Deployment Reality in Protocol
Development Workshop 2019, Internet Architecture Board
https://www.iab.org/activities/workshops/dedr-
workshop/position-papers/
[5] Consolidation In the Internet Economy, Internet Society, 2019.
https://future.internetsociety.org/2019/consolidation-in-the-
internet-economy
[6] IBID page 5.
[7] Journal of Cyber Policy, Volume 5, Issue 1 (2020) Special
Issue: Consolidation of the Internet
(https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rcyb20/5/1)
[8] An Empirical View on Consolidation of the Web, Trinh Viet
Doan, Roland van Rijswijk-Deij, Oliver Hohlfeld, and Vaibhav
Bajpai. 2022. ACM Trans. Internet Technol. 22, 3, Article 70
(February 2022),
https://vaibhavbajpai.com/documents/papers/proceedings/web-
consolidation-toit-2022.pdf
[9] IBID page 70:3
[10] RFC 8890, The Internet is for End Users. Nottingham, Mark.
August 2020. https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8890
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 9]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
10. Acknowledgments
Many thanks to all who discussed this with us in DINRG in 2021 and
2022.
This document was prepared using 2-Word-v2.0.template.dot.
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 10]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
Authors' Addresses
Mark McFadden
Internet policy advisors ltd
Chepstow, Wales, UK
Email: mark@internetpolicyadvisors.com
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 11]
Independent Submission M. McFadden
Internet Draft Internet policy advisors, ltd
October 24, 2022
Intended status: Informational
Expires: April 23, 2023
A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation
draft-mcfadden-consolidation-taxonomy-00.txt
Status of this Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that
other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-
Drafts.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six
months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents
at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as
reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at
http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt
The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at
http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html
This Internet-Draft will expire on April 23, 2023.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2022 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
(http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
publication of this document. Please review these documents
carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with
respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this
document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in
Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without
warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License.
McFadden Expires April 23, 2021 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
Abstract
This document contributes to the ongoing discussion surrounding
Internet consolidation. At recent IETF meetings discussions about
Internet consolidation revealed that different perspectives gave
completely different views of what consolidation means. While we use
the term consolidation to refer to the process of increasing control
over Internet infrastructure and services by a small set of
organizations, it is clear that that control is expressed through
economic, network traffic and protocol concerns. As a contribution
to the discussion surrounding consolidation, this document attempts
to provide a taxonomy of Internet consolidation with the goal of
adding clarity to a complex discussion.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction - Why a Taxonomy?.................................2
2. Background to Consolidation Issues.............................3
3. Economic Consolidation.........................................4
3.1. Economic Revenue Consolidation............................4
3.2. Economic Flow Consolidation...............................5
4. Traffic and Infrastructure Consolidation.......................5
5. Architectural Consolidation....................................6
5.1. The Rise of Intermediaries................................6
5.2. Vertical Architectural Consolidation......................7
5.3. Standards Development.....................................7
6. Service and Application Consolidation..........................8
7. Security Considerations........................................8
8. IANA Considerations............................................8
9. References.....................................................9
9.1. Informative References....................................9
10. Acknowledgments..............................................10
1. Introduction - Why a Taxonomy?
Internet consolidation has been under discussion for the last
several years. The 2019 Internet Society's "Global Internet Report:
Consolidation and the Internet Economy" highlighted issues on this
topic and kicked started a series of discussions and publications
around consolidation. The DINRG Workshop on Centralization took
place in June of 2021 and was reported on at IETF 114. Furthermore,
a draft for the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) discussed issues
of economic and technical consolidation. [1] Despite community
interest, the draft expired without further work or publication.
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 2]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
Several other contributions have focused on responses to
consolidation. However, the report from the DINRG Workshop makes
clear that there are different "categories of centralization." This
draft does not attempt to propose responses to centralization,
instead it attempts to build upon the Workshop's summary of
"categories of centralization" with a goal of supporting future work
and discussion.
2. Background to Consolidation Issues
Internet consolidation is "the process of increasing control over
internet infrastructure and services by a small set of
organizations." [2] Economy of scale is the driving force behind
consolidation because markets naturally consolidate when economies
of scale come into play.
The DINRG Workshop Report notes that:
"- the economy of scale enables one to generate the same service
outcome with far lower production costs, and consume fewer resources
for each instance of the service transaction.
- a large user pool produces big data which helps improve service
customization for each user, letting bigger companies gain an edge
over smaller competitors.
- centralized application developments reduce the number of
platforms, hence substantially reduce the cost in development and
maintenance, and circumvent interoperability issues. Consolidated
development and operational efforts also help mitigate technical
expertise shortages.
- most of all, monopoly players can dictate to the market the terms
of the service and the service price bought to the market, which
causes longer term stagnation of the market and increased
inefficiency within the market, which acts as a drag on further
innovation."
The current consolidation and centralization of control and
operation of Internet infrastructure and services was not an
original design goal. In fact, RFC1958 says:
"This allows for uniform and relatively seamless operations in a
competitive, multi-vendor, multi-provider public network."
and later,
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 3]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
"Heterogeneity is inevitable and must be supported by design."[3]
Much of the discussion surrounding consolidation focuses on Internet
services, applications and data.[4] However, contributions to the
discussion of consolidation have also addressed economic, traffic
and architectural consolidation. In recognition of this, a taxonomy
with four main categories is proposed:
- Economic Consolidation
- Traffic and Infrastructure Consolidation
- Architectural Consolidation
- Service and Application Consolidation
3. Economic Consolidation
The Internet Society Report on Internet Consolidation suggests that
the Internet's economy is defined as the economic activities that
either support the Internet or are fundamentally dependent on the
Internet's existence.
As a result, economic consolidation on the Internet refers to the
effects of market consolidation on competition and the economic
power of a small set of companies that dominate economic activity in
the Internet. There are two aspects to economic consolidation on the
Internet.
Economic consolidation means that a small number of companies
dominate the marketplace and hence, the revenues gathered from the
use of the Internet.
Economic consolidation also means that a small number of companies
control the flow of capital among enterprises that provide services
on the Internet.
3.1. Economic Revenue Consolidation
One of the two aspects of economic consolidation is the generation
of revenue by a small number of enterprises. As an example, Amazon
accounts for more than 45% of all online retail spending in the
United States. Alibaba is estimated to have 60% or the electronic
commerce market in China. Meta - including Facebook, Messenger,
WhatsApp and Instagram - dominates social media and messaging
holding four of the world's top six social media platforms. [6]
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In each of these cases, a very small number of companies operate
extremely popular services, concentrating revenue generation into
those companies. In fact, the popularity of these services is so
great that value is created by adding other, complementary services
onto the base they provide. The dominant services thus control the
foundation upon which other revenue streams are built. [7]
3.2. Economic Flow Consolidation
In addition to revenue generation, the very large application layer
companies (Alphabet, Amazon, Tencent, Meta and Alibaba) control how
money and capital moves through enterprises providing services on
the Internet.
We have seen that embedded intermediaries that have substantial
power can implement platforms that provide services to downstream
consumers as well as upstream sources of content and applications.
As the controlling intermediary for those services and applications,
these large companies are also able to dictate how economic flows
move between consumers and providers of applications and services.
Regulators and policy makers often are concerned about the enormous
market power that these huge intermediaries have, but refrain from
imposing controls or sanctions on the grounds that consumers get
significant benefits when platform operators use upstream revenues
to subsidize downstream services.
4. Traffic and Infrastructure Consolidation
A significant majority of the Internet's traffic is delivered from
very large content services including Google, Amazon and Facebook.
These companies naturally attempt to provide the best possible
service for their customers - including perceived speed of content
delivery - these content services seek to establish connections
directly with the companies providing access to the network. The
result is a "flattening" of the Internet's traditional topology.
In fact, a recent study shows that these large services can reach
more than 76% of the Internet without having to traverse traditional
Tier 1 and Tier 2 ISPs. Besides bringing benefits of low latency and
higher security to their uses, these large-scale networks are also
able to implement improvements and innovations in protocol design by
having far greater control over the elements of the infrastructure
being used to deliver services.
An empirical view of this consolidation in February of 2022 [8]
shows that the number of webpages that are hosted on these networks
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has increased from 2015 to 2020 at a rate exceeding 80%. In looking
at data sources including TLD datasets and Alexa Top 1M datasets
only a small number of content delivery networks host the vast
majority of landing pages.
Centralization of this sort makes traffic filtering easier since
forcing a content network to block specific content (or worse,
blocking the content network entirely) would make a large amount of
the content unavailable. As these networks begin to migrate other
services to HTTP (for instance, DNS over HTTP), more than the web is
affected by the impacts of filtering by centralized content
services. In fact, blocking a content network entirely would block
all the content of the network, not just the content that was the
target of the filtering.
This happens at all layers. As an example at the application layer,
in 2021 Google and Apple were forced to remove applications created
by the Russian political opposition from their stores. The ability
of a government to influence the content network means that
centralization can lead to a reduction in the diversity of
information or services on the Internet.
As the content networks grow in scale, the networks themselves grow
to support the required network capacity. This sets up a feedback
look that drives market concentration toward the infrastructure
provided by the content networks. As these networks grow larger, it
becomes difficult for smaller networks and infrastructure providers
to compete with the economies of scale from which the large networks
benefit.
5. Architectural Consolidation
A third category of consolidation is the evolution of the Internet's
architecture to meet contemporary use cases and requirements. Early
descriptions of the Internet's architecture described heterogeneous
endpoints connected by neutral transports. The end-to-end principle
suggested that the transport of data between endpoints was provided
without much intervention. [10]
Two developments have led to architectural consolidation: the
emergence of intermediary services and the movement of transport
related code to the application layer.
5.1. The Rise of Intermediaries
In the first case, technologies like CDNs are built into the network
for the efficient delivery of content and services. The consumer is
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largely unaware that the service or application is being hosted by
an organization other than they one they think they contacted.
Instead, content delivery is pushed as close to the consumer as
possible to ensure that the end-user experience is as optimal as
possible.
The result is a series of security, economic and policy concerns
associated with the small number of very large providers of these
intermediary services. However, in this section we only want to
consider the architectural issues specific to the use of
intermediaries.
5.2. Vertical Architectural Consolidation
The second case is vertical architectural consolidation. This is
where the companies that control the applications attempt to control
all aspects of the communication. For instance, the provider of the
browser may be the organization that the browser connects to. The
advantage of this kind of architectural consolidation is that it
allows the largest players to introduce technological innovation
more quickly than if multiple layers of the stack required
innovation in parallel.
With tools like DNS over HTTPS, we see applications taking control
of the infrastructure of transport in addition to providing an
application or service. Applications essentially provide their own
ecosystem (from centralized control of DNS services all the way to
the end-user experience).
5.3. Standards Development
Others have rightly observed that, in the current environment,
development of protocols and standards for the Internet is largely
confined to a small number of participants from a small number of
organizations. One trend is that the giant enterprises on the
Internet also dominate the development of protocols.
Having a small number of organizations controlling the
infrastructure of the Internet also means that innovative
technologies can be implemented quickly and at large-scale. In 2022,
a study in the ACM Transactions on Internet Technology found that
Google accounting for 60% of all TLS 1.3 secured resources. Some
other, large CDNs use TLS 1.3 almost exclusively. QUIC is also an
example of a new technology that profits from consolidation. Large
scale intermediaries can facilitate the deployment and adoption of
new standards because the decision for the adoption is propagated
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 7]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
across the infrastructure instead of through user adoption or
feature updates.
6. Service and Application Consolidation
Services and applications are those tools that users see when they
interact with the Internet. They take advantage of the
infrastructure (and, access) parts of the Internet's ecosystem.
According to the Internet Society's report on consolidation, "a
small number of companies operating some of the Internet's most
popular services dominate this market. Many of these companies act
as multi-sided markets or platforms, meaning they offer a base upon
which other applications, processes or technologies can be
developed."
By itself, Google holds 90% of the global search market, the number
one mobile operating system (Android), the top-user-generated video
platform and has more than 1.5 billion active users of its Gmail
email service. Google also has a map service, a public DNS resolver
service, a cloud service and a document store.
While twenty years ago, an application would simply rely on the
underlying operating system to provide its communications and
transport services, now applications and services do this for
themselves. This is a case of the intermediary or platform providing
the application integrating all the necessary components for
providing a service on the Internet.
7. Security Considerations
While this document does not describe a specific protocol, it does
discuss the evolving architecture of the Internet. Changes to the
Internet's architecture have direct and indirect implications for
the Internet's threat model. In another draft [20]REFERENCE, we
discuss how the evolution of the Internet has changed the threat
model. Specifically, the changes to the end-to-end model (see
section 4.2 above) have inserted new interfaces which must be
reflected in security considerations for new protocols.
8. IANA Considerations
This memo contains no instructions or requests for IANA. Conclusions
This document seeks to rekindle and restart the discussion on
consolidation. As argued above, Internet consolidation is happening
at different places and different layers of the Internet. Though
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 8]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
there has been interest in the Internet consolidation in the past,
now is the time to start the discussions again.
9. References
9.1. Informative References
[1] Considerations on Internet Consolidation and the Internet
Architecture [draft-arkko-iab-internet-consolidation-02].
[2] IBID
[3] Draft Report of DINRG Workshop on Centralization in the
Internet, June 3, 2021, Huitema, Huston, Kutscher, Zhang,
https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/114/materials/slides-114-
dinrg-draft-report-of-dinrg-workshop-on-centralization-in-the-
internet-01.pdf
[4] Design Expectations vs. Deployment Reality in Protocol
Development Workshop 2019, Internet Architecture Board
https://www.iab.org/activities/workshops/dedr-
workshop/position-papers/
[5] Consolidation In the Internet Economy, Internet Society, 2019.
https://future.internetsociety.org/2019/consolidation-in-the-
internet-economy
[6] IBID page 5.
[7] Journal of Cyber Policy, Volume 5, Issue 1 (2020) Special
Issue: Consolidation of the Internet
(https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rcyb20/5/1)
[8] An Empirical View on Consolidation of the Web, Trinh Viet
Doan, Roland van Rijswijk-Deij, Oliver Hohlfeld, and Vaibhav
Bajpai. 2022. ACM Trans. Internet Technol. 22, 3, Article 70
(February 2022),
https://vaibhavbajpai.com/documents/papers/proceedings/web-
consolidation-toit-2022.pdf
[9] IBID page 70:3
[10] RFC 8890, The Internet is for End Users. Nottingham, Mark.
August 2020. https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8890
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 9]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
10. Acknowledgments
Many thanks to all who discussed this with us in DINRG in 2021 and
2022.
This document was prepared using 2-Word-v2.0.template.dot.
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 10]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
Authors' Addresses
Mark McFadden
Internet policy advisors ltd
Chepstow, Wales, UK
Email: mark@internetpolicyadvisors.com
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 11]
Independent Submission M. McFadden
Internet Draft Internet policy advisors, ltd
October 24, 2022
Intended status: Informational
Expires: April 23, 2023
A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation
draft-mcfadden-consolidation-taxonomy-00.txt
Status of this Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that
other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-
Drafts.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six
months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents
at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as
reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at
http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt
The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at
http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html
This Internet-Draft will expire on April 23, 2023.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2022 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
(http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
publication of this document. Please review these documents
carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with
respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this
document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in
Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without
warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License.
McFadden Expires April 23, 2021 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
Abstract
This document contributes to the ongoing discussion surrounding
Internet consolidation. At recent IETF meetings discussions about
Internet consolidation revealed that different perspectives gave
completely different views of what consolidation means. While we use
the term consolidation to refer to the process of increasing control
over Internet infrastructure and services by a small set of
organizations, it is clear that that control is expressed through
economic, network traffic and protocol concerns. As a contribution
to the discussion surrounding consolidation, this document attempts
to provide a taxonomy of Internet consolidation with the goal of
adding clarity to a complex discussion.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction - Why a Taxonomy?.................................2
2. Background to Consolidation Issues.............................3
3. Economic Consolidation.........................................4
3.1. Economic Revenue Consolidation............................4
3.2. Economic Flow Consolidation...............................5
4. Traffic and Infrastructure Consolidation.......................5
5. Architectural Consolidation....................................6
5.1. The Rise of Intermediaries................................6
5.2. Vertical Architectural Consolidation......................7
5.3. Standards Development.....................................7
6. Service and Application Consolidation..........................8
7. Security Considerations........................................8
8. IANA Considerations............................................8
9. References.....................................................9
9.1. Informative References....................................9
10. Acknowledgments..............................................10
1. Introduction - Why a Taxonomy?
Internet consolidation has been under discussion for the last
several years. The 2019 Internet Society's "Global Internet Report:
Consolidation and the Internet Economy" highlighted issues on this
topic and kicked started a series of discussions and publications
around consolidation. The DINRG Workshop on Centralization took
place in June of 2021 and was reported on at IETF 114. Furthermore,
a draft for the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) discussed issues
of economic and technical consolidation. [1] Despite community
interest, the draft expired without further work or publication.
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 2]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
Several other contributions have focused on responses to
consolidation. However, the report from the DINRG Workshop makes
clear that there are different "categories of centralization." This
draft does not attempt to propose responses to centralization,
instead it attempts to build upon the Workshop's summary of
"categories of centralization" with a goal of supporting future work
and discussion.
2. Background to Consolidation Issues
Internet consolidation is "the process of increasing control over
internet infrastructure and services by a small set of
organizations." [2] Economy of scale is the driving force behind
consolidation because markets naturally consolidate when economies
of scale come into play.
The DINRG Workshop Report notes that:
"- the economy of scale enables one to generate the same service
outcome with far lower production costs, and consume fewer resources
for each instance of the service transaction.
- a large user pool produces big data which helps improve service
customization for each user, letting bigger companies gain an edge
over smaller competitors.
- centralized application developments reduce the number of
platforms, hence substantially reduce the cost in development and
maintenance, and circumvent interoperability issues. Consolidated
development and operational efforts also help mitigate technical
expertise shortages.
- most of all, monopoly players can dictate to the market the terms
of the service and the service price bought to the market, which
causes longer term stagnation of the market and increased
inefficiency within the market, which acts as a drag on further
innovation."
The current consolidation and centralization of control and
operation of Internet infrastructure and services was not an
original design goal. In fact, RFC1958 says:
"This allows for uniform and relatively seamless operations in a
competitive, multi-vendor, multi-provider public network."
and later,
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 3]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
"Heterogeneity is inevitable and must be supported by design."[3]
Much of the discussion surrounding consolidation focuses on Internet
services, applications and data.[4] However, contributions to the
discussion of consolidation have also addressed economic, traffic
and architectural consolidation. In recognition of this, a taxonomy
with four main categories is proposed:
- Economic Consolidation
- Traffic and Infrastructure Consolidation
- Architectural Consolidation
- Service and Application Consolidation
3. Economic Consolidation
The Internet Society Report on Internet Consolidation suggests that
the Internet's economy is defined as the economic activities that
either support the Internet or are fundamentally dependent on the
Internet's existence.
As a result, economic consolidation on the Internet refers to the
effects of market consolidation on competition and the economic
power of a small set of companies that dominate economic activity in
the Internet. There are two aspects to economic consolidation on the
Internet.
Economic consolidation means that a small number of companies
dominate the marketplace and hence, the revenues gathered from the
use of the Internet.
Economic consolidation also means that a small number of companies
control the flow of capital among enterprises that provide services
on the Internet.
3.1. Economic Revenue Consolidation
One of the two aspects of economic consolidation is the generation
of revenue by a small number of enterprises. As an example, Amazon
accounts for more than 45% of all online retail spending in the
United States. Alibaba is estimated to have 60% or the electronic
commerce market in China. Meta - including Facebook, Messenger,
WhatsApp and Instagram - dominates social media and messaging
holding four of the world's top six social media platforms. [6]
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 4]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
In each of these cases, a very small number of companies operate
extremely popular services, concentrating revenue generation into
those companies. In fact, the popularity of these services is so
great that value is created by adding other, complementary services
onto the base they provide. The dominant services thus control the
foundation upon which other revenue streams are built. [7]
3.2. Economic Flow Consolidation
In addition to revenue generation, the very large application layer
companies (Alphabet, Amazon, Tencent, Meta and Alibaba) control how
money and capital moves through enterprises providing services on
the Internet.
We have seen that embedded intermediaries that have substantial
power can implement platforms that provide services to downstream
consumers as well as upstream sources of content and applications.
As the controlling intermediary for those services and applications,
these large companies are also able to dictate how economic flows
move between consumers and providers of applications and services.
Regulators and policy makers often are concerned about the enormous
market power that these huge intermediaries have, but refrain from
imposing controls or sanctions on the grounds that consumers get
significant benefits when platform operators use upstream revenues
to subsidize downstream services.
4. Traffic and Infrastructure Consolidation
A significant majority of the Internet's traffic is delivered from
very large content services including Google, Amazon and Facebook.
These companies naturally attempt to provide the best possible
service for their customers - including perceived speed of content
delivery - these content services seek to establish connections
directly with the companies providing access to the network. The
result is a "flattening" of the Internet's traditional topology.
In fact, a recent study shows that these large services can reach
more than 76% of the Internet without having to traverse traditional
Tier 1 and Tier 2 ISPs. Besides bringing benefits of low latency and
higher security to their uses, these large-scale networks are also
able to implement improvements and innovations in protocol design by
having far greater control over the elements of the infrastructure
being used to deliver services.
An empirical view of this consolidation in February of 2022 [8]
shows that the number of webpages that are hosted on these networks
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 5]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
has increased from 2015 to 2020 at a rate exceeding 80%. In looking
at data sources including TLD datasets and Alexa Top 1M datasets
only a small number of content delivery networks host the vast
majority of landing pages.
Centralization of this sort makes traffic filtering easier since
forcing a content network to block specific content (or worse,
blocking the content network entirely) would make a large amount of
the content unavailable. As these networks begin to migrate other
services to HTTP (for instance, DNS over HTTP), more than the web is
affected by the impacts of filtering by centralized content
services. In fact, blocking a content network entirely would block
all the content of the network, not just the content that was the
target of the filtering.
This happens at all layers. As an example at the application layer,
in 2021 Google and Apple were forced to remove applications created
by the Russian political opposition from their stores. The ability
of a government to influence the content network means that
centralization can lead to a reduction in the diversity of
information or services on the Internet.
As the content networks grow in scale, the networks themselves grow
to support the required network capacity. This sets up a feedback
look that drives market concentration toward the infrastructure
provided by the content networks. As these networks grow larger, it
becomes difficult for smaller networks and infrastructure providers
to compete with the economies of scale from which the large networks
benefit.
5. Architectural Consolidation
A third category of consolidation is the evolution of the Internet's
architecture to meet contemporary use cases and requirements. Early
descriptions of the Internet's architecture described heterogeneous
endpoints connected by neutral transports. The end-to-end principle
suggested that the transport of data between endpoints was provided
without much intervention. [10]
Two developments have led to architectural consolidation: the
emergence of intermediary services and the movement of transport
related code to the application layer.
5.1. The Rise of Intermediaries
In the first case, technologies like CDNs are built into the network
for the efficient delivery of content and services. The consumer is
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 6]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
largely unaware that the service or application is being hosted by
an organization other than they one they think they contacted.
Instead, content delivery is pushed as close to the consumer as
possible to ensure that the end-user experience is as optimal as
possible.
The result is a series of security, economic and policy concerns
associated with the small number of very large providers of these
intermediary services. However, in this section we only want to
consider the architectural issues specific to the use of
intermediaries.
5.2. Vertical Architectural Consolidation
The second case is vertical architectural consolidation. This is
where the companies that control the applications attempt to control
all aspects of the communication. For instance, the provider of the
browser may be the organization that the browser connects to. The
advantage of this kind of architectural consolidation is that it
allows the largest players to introduce technological innovation
more quickly than if multiple layers of the stack required
innovation in parallel.
With tools like DNS over HTTPS, we see applications taking control
of the infrastructure of transport in addition to providing an
application or service. Applications essentially provide their own
ecosystem (from centralized control of DNS services all the way to
the end-user experience).
5.3. Standards Development
Others have rightly observed that, in the current environment,
development of protocols and standards for the Internet is largely
confined to a small number of participants from a small number of
organizations. One trend is that the giant enterprises on the
Internet also dominate the development of protocols.
Having a small number of organizations controlling the
infrastructure of the Internet also means that innovative
technologies can be implemented quickly and at large-scale. In 2022,
a study in the ACM Transactions on Internet Technology found that
Google accounting for 60% of all TLS 1.3 secured resources. Some
other, large CDNs use TLS 1.3 almost exclusively. QUIC is also an
example of a new technology that profits from consolidation. Large
scale intermediaries can facilitate the deployment and adoption of
new standards because the decision for the adoption is propagated
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 7]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
across the infrastructure instead of through user adoption or
feature updates.
6. Service and Application Consolidation
Services and applications are those tools that users see when they
interact with the Internet. They take advantage of the
infrastructure (and, access) parts of the Internet's ecosystem.
According to the Internet Society's report on consolidation, "a
small number of companies operating some of the Internet's most
popular services dominate this market. Many of these companies act
as multi-sided markets or platforms, meaning they offer a base upon
which other applications, processes or technologies can be
developed."
By itself, Google holds 90% of the global search market, the number
one mobile operating system (Android), the top-user-generated video
platform and has more than 1.5 billion active users of its Gmail
email service. Google also has a map service, a public DNS resolver
service, a cloud service and a document store.
While twenty years ago, an application would simply rely on the
underlying operating system to provide its communications and
transport services, now applications and services do this for
themselves. This is a case of the intermediary or platform providing
the application integrating all the necessary components for
providing a service on the Internet.
7. Security Considerations
While this document does not describe a specific protocol, it does
discuss the evolving architecture of the Internet. Changes to the
Internet's architecture have direct and indirect implications for
the Internet's threat model. In another draft [20]REFERENCE, we
discuss how the evolution of the Internet has changed the threat
model. Specifically, the changes to the end-to-end model (see
section 4.2 above) have inserted new interfaces which must be
reflected in security considerations for new protocols.
8. IANA Considerations
This memo contains no instructions or requests for IANA. Conclusions
This document seeks to rekindle and restart the discussion on
consolidation. As argued above, Internet consolidation is happening
at different places and different layers of the Internet. Though
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 8]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
there has been interest in the Internet consolidation in the past,
now is the time to start the discussions again.
9. References
9.1. Informative References
[1] Considerations on Internet Consolidation and the Internet
Architecture [draft-arkko-iab-internet-consolidation-02].
[2] IBID
[3] Draft Report of DINRG Workshop on Centralization in the
Internet, June 3, 2021, Huitema, Huston, Kutscher, Zhang,
https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/114/materials/slides-114-
dinrg-draft-report-of-dinrg-workshop-on-centralization-in-the-
internet-01.pdf
[4] Design Expectations vs. Deployment Reality in Protocol
Development Workshop 2019, Internet Architecture Board
https://www.iab.org/activities/workshops/dedr-
workshop/position-papers/
[5] Consolidation In the Internet Economy, Internet Society, 2019.
https://future.internetsociety.org/2019/consolidation-in-the-
internet-economy
[6] IBID page 5.
[7] Journal of Cyber Policy, Volume 5, Issue 1 (2020) Special
Issue: Consolidation of the Internet
(https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rcyb20/5/1)
[8] An Empirical View on Consolidation of the Web, Trinh Viet
Doan, Roland van Rijswijk-Deij, Oliver Hohlfeld, and Vaibhav
Bajpai. 2022. ACM Trans. Internet Technol. 22, 3, Article 70
(February 2022),
https://vaibhavbajpai.com/documents/papers/proceedings/web-
consolidation-toit-2022.pdf
[9] IBID page 70:3
[10] RFC 8890, The Internet is for End Users. Nottingham, Mark.
August 2020. https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8890
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 9]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
10. Acknowledgments
Many thanks to all who discussed this with us in DINRG in 2021 and
2022.
This document was prepared using 2-Word-v2.0.template.dot.
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 10]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
Authors' Addresses
Mark McFadden
Internet policy advisors ltd
Chepstow, Wales, UK
Email: mark@internetpolicyadvisors.com
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 11]
Independent Submission M. McFadden
Internet Draft Internet policy advisors, ltd
October 24, 2022
Intended status: Informational
Expires: April 23, 2023
A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation
draft-mcfadden-consolidation-taxonomy-00.txt
Status of this Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that
other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-
Drafts.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six
months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents
at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as
reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at
http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt
The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at
http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html
This Internet-Draft will expire on April 23, 2023.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2022 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
(http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
publication of this document. Please review these documents
carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with
respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this
document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in
Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without
warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License.
McFadden Expires April 23, 2021 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
Abstract
This document contributes to the ongoing discussion surrounding
Internet consolidation. At recent IETF meetings discussions about
Internet consolidation revealed that different perspectives gave
completely different views of what consolidation means. While we use
the term consolidation to refer to the process of increasing control
over Internet infrastructure and services by a small set of
organizations, it is clear that that control is expressed through
economic, network traffic and protocol concerns. As a contribution
to the discussion surrounding consolidation, this document attempts
to provide a taxonomy of Internet consolidation with the goal of
adding clarity to a complex discussion.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction - Why a Taxonomy?.................................2
2. Background to Consolidation Issues.............................3
3. Economic Consolidation.........................................4
3.1. Economic Revenue Consolidation............................4
3.2. Economic Flow Consolidation...............................5
4. Traffic and Infrastructure Consolidation.......................5
5. Architectural Consolidation....................................6
5.1. The Rise of Intermediaries................................6
5.2. Vertical Architectural Consolidation......................7
5.3. Standards Development.....................................7
6. Service and Application Consolidation..........................8
7. Security Considerations........................................8
8. IANA Considerations............................................8
9. References.....................................................9
9.1. Informative References....................................9
10. Acknowledgments..............................................10
1. Introduction - Why a Taxonomy?
Internet consolidation has been under discussion for the last
several years. The 2019 Internet Society's "Global Internet Report:
Consolidation and the Internet Economy" highlighted issues on this
topic and kicked started a series of discussions and publications
around consolidation. The DINRG Workshop on Centralization took
place in June of 2021 and was reported on at IETF 114. Furthermore,
a draft for the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) discussed issues
of economic and technical consolidation. [1] Despite community
interest, the draft expired without further work or publication.
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 2]
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Several other contributions have focused on responses to
consolidation. However, the report from the DINRG Workshop makes
clear that there are different "categories of centralization." This
draft does not attempt to propose responses to centralization,
instead it attempts to build upon the Workshop's summary of
"categories of centralization" with a goal of supporting future work
and discussion.
2. Background to Consolidation Issues
Internet consolidation is "the process of increasing control over
internet infrastructure and services by a small set of
organizations." [2] Economy of scale is the driving force behind
consolidation because markets naturally consolidate when economies
of scale come into play.
The DINRG Workshop Report notes that:
"- the economy of scale enables one to generate the same service
outcome with far lower production costs, and consume fewer resources
for each instance of the service transaction.
- a large user pool produces big data which helps improve service
customization for each user, letting bigger companies gain an edge
over smaller competitors.
- centralized application developments reduce the number of
platforms, hence substantially reduce the cost in development and
maintenance, and circumvent interoperability issues. Consolidated
development and operational efforts also help mitigate technical
expertise shortages.
- most of all, monopoly players can dictate to the market the terms
of the service and the service price bought to the market, which
causes longer term stagnation of the market and increased
inefficiency within the market, which acts as a drag on further
innovation."
The current consolidation and centralization of control and
operation of Internet infrastructure and services was not an
original design goal. In fact, RFC1958 says:
"This allows for uniform and relatively seamless operations in a
competitive, multi-vendor, multi-provider public network."
and later,
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 3]
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"Heterogeneity is inevitable and must be supported by design."[3]
Much of the discussion surrounding consolidation focuses on Internet
services, applications and data.[4] However, contributions to the
discussion of consolidation have also addressed economic, traffic
and architectural consolidation. In recognition of this, a taxonomy
with four main categories is proposed:
- Economic Consolidation
- Traffic and Infrastructure Consolidation
- Architectural Consolidation
- Service and Application Consolidation
3. Economic Consolidation
The Internet Society Report on Internet Consolidation suggests that
the Internet's economy is defined as the economic activities that
either support the Internet or are fundamentally dependent on the
Internet's existence.
As a result, economic consolidation on the Internet refers to the
effects of market consolidation on competition and the economic
power of a small set of companies that dominate economic activity in
the Internet. There are two aspects to economic consolidation on the
Internet.
Economic consolidation means that a small number of companies
dominate the marketplace and hence, the revenues gathered from the
use of the Internet.
Economic consolidation also means that a small number of companies
control the flow of capital among enterprises that provide services
on the Internet.
3.1. Economic Revenue Consolidation
One of the two aspects of economic consolidation is the generation
of revenue by a small number of enterprises. As an example, Amazon
accounts for more than 45% of all online retail spending in the
United States. Alibaba is estimated to have 60% or the electronic
commerce market in China. Meta - including Facebook, Messenger,
WhatsApp and Instagram - dominates social media and messaging
holding four of the world's top six social media platforms. [6]
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In each of these cases, a very small number of companies operate
extremely popular services, concentrating revenue generation into
those companies. In fact, the popularity of these services is so
great that value is created by adding other, complementary services
onto the base they provide. The dominant services thus control the
foundation upon which other revenue streams are built. [7]
3.2. Economic Flow Consolidation
In addition to revenue generation, the very large application layer
companies (Alphabet, Amazon, Tencent, Meta and Alibaba) control how
money and capital moves through enterprises providing services on
the Internet.
We have seen that embedded intermediaries that have substantial
power can implement platforms that provide services to downstream
consumers as well as upstream sources of content and applications.
As the controlling intermediary for those services and applications,
these large companies are also able to dictate how economic flows
move between consumers and providers of applications and services.
Regulators and policy makers often are concerned about the enormous
market power that these huge intermediaries have, but refrain from
imposing controls or sanctions on the grounds that consumers get
significant benefits when platform operators use upstream revenues
to subsidize downstream services.
4. Traffic and Infrastructure Consolidation
A significant majority of the Internet's traffic is delivered from
very large content services including Google, Amazon and Facebook.
These companies naturally attempt to provide the best possible
service for their customers - including perceived speed of content
delivery - these content services seek to establish connections
directly with the companies providing access to the network. The
result is a "flattening" of the Internet's traditional topology.
In fact, a recent study shows that these large services can reach
more than 76% of the Internet without having to traverse traditional
Tier 1 and Tier 2 ISPs. Besides bringing benefits of low latency and
higher security to their uses, these large-scale networks are also
able to implement improvements and innovations in protocol design by
having far greater control over the elements of the infrastructure
being used to deliver services.
An empirical view of this consolidation in February of 2022 [8]
shows that the number of webpages that are hosted on these networks
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 5]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
has increased from 2015 to 2020 at a rate exceeding 80%. In looking
at data sources including TLD datasets and Alexa Top 1M datasets
only a small number of content delivery networks host the vast
majority of landing pages.
Centralization of this sort makes traffic filtering easier since
forcing a content network to block specific content (or worse,
blocking the content network entirely) would make a large amount of
the content unavailable. As these networks begin to migrate other
services to HTTP (for instance, DNS over HTTP), more than the web is
affected by the impacts of filtering by centralized content
services. In fact, blocking a content network entirely would block
all the content of the network, not just the content that was the
target of the filtering.
This happens at all layers. As an example at the application layer,
in 2021 Google and Apple were forced to remove applications created
by the Russian political opposition from their stores. The ability
of a government to influence the content network means that
centralization can lead to a reduction in the diversity of
information or services on the Internet.
As the content networks grow in scale, the networks themselves grow
to support the required network capacity. This sets up a feedback
look that drives market concentration toward the infrastructure
provided by the content networks. As these networks grow larger, it
becomes difficult for smaller networks and infrastructure providers
to compete with the economies of scale from which the large networks
benefit.
5. Architectural Consolidation
A third category of consolidation is the evolution of the Internet's
architecture to meet contemporary use cases and requirements. Early
descriptions of the Internet's architecture described heterogeneous
endpoints connected by neutral transports. The end-to-end principle
suggested that the transport of data between endpoints was provided
without much intervention. [10]
Two developments have led to architectural consolidation: the
emergence of intermediary services and the movement of transport
related code to the application layer.
5.1. The Rise of Intermediaries
In the first case, technologies like CDNs are built into the network
for the efficient delivery of content and services. The consumer is
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 6]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
largely unaware that the service or application is being hosted by
an organization other than they one they think they contacted.
Instead, content delivery is pushed as close to the consumer as
possible to ensure that the end-user experience is as optimal as
possible.
The result is a series of security, economic and policy concerns
associated with the small number of very large providers of these
intermediary services. However, in this section we only want to
consider the architectural issues specific to the use of
intermediaries.
5.2. Vertical Architectural Consolidation
The second case is vertical architectural consolidation. This is
where the companies that control the applications attempt to control
all aspects of the communication. For instance, the provider of the
browser may be the organization that the browser connects to. The
advantage of this kind of architectural consolidation is that it
allows the largest players to introduce technological innovation
more quickly than if multiple layers of the stack required
innovation in parallel.
With tools like DNS over HTTPS, we see applications taking control
of the infrastructure of transport in addition to providing an
application or service. Applications essentially provide their own
ecosystem (from centralized control of DNS services all the way to
the end-user experience).
5.3. Standards Development
Others have rightly observed that, in the current environment,
development of protocols and standards for the Internet is largely
confined to a small number of participants from a small number of
organizations. One trend is that the giant enterprises on the
Internet also dominate the development of protocols.
Having a small number of organizations controlling the
infrastructure of the Internet also means that innovative
technologies can be implemented quickly and at large-scale. In 2022,
a study in the ACM Transactions on Internet Technology found that
Google accounting for 60% of all TLS 1.3 secured resources. Some
other, large CDNs use TLS 1.3 almost exclusively. QUIC is also an
example of a new technology that profits from consolidation. Large
scale intermediaries can facilitate the deployment and adoption of
new standards because the decision for the adoption is propagated
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 7]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
across the infrastructure instead of through user adoption or
feature updates.
6. Service and Application Consolidation
Services and applications are those tools that users see when they
interact with the Internet. They take advantage of the
infrastructure (and, access) parts of the Internet's ecosystem.
According to the Internet Society's report on consolidation, "a
small number of companies operating some of the Internet's most
popular services dominate this market. Many of these companies act
as multi-sided markets or platforms, meaning they offer a base upon
which other applications, processes or technologies can be
developed."
By itself, Google holds 90% of the global search market, the number
one mobile operating system (Android), the top-user-generated video
platform and has more than 1.5 billion active users of its Gmail
email service. Google also has a map service, a public DNS resolver
service, a cloud service and a document store.
While twenty years ago, an application would simply rely on the
underlying operating system to provide its communications and
transport services, now applications and services do this for
themselves. This is a case of the intermediary or platform providing
the application integrating all the necessary components for
providing a service on the Internet.
7. Security Considerations
While this document does not describe a specific protocol, it does
discuss the evolving architecture of the Internet. Changes to the
Internet's architecture have direct and indirect implications for
the Internet's threat model. In another draft [20]REFERENCE, we
discuss how the evolution of the Internet has changed the threat
model. Specifically, the changes to the end-to-end model (see
section 4.2 above) have inserted new interfaces which must be
reflected in security considerations for new protocols.
8. IANA Considerations
This memo contains no instructions or requests for IANA. Conclusions
This document seeks to rekindle and restart the discussion on
consolidation. As argued above, Internet consolidation is happening
at different places and different layers of the Internet. Though
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 8]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
there has been interest in the Internet consolidation in the past,
now is the time to start the discussions again.
9. References
9.1. Informative References
[1] Considerations on Internet Consolidation and the Internet
Architecture [draft-arkko-iab-internet-consolidation-02].
[2] IBID
[3] Draft Report of DINRG Workshop on Centralization in the
Internet, June 3, 2021, Huitema, Huston, Kutscher, Zhang,
https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/114/materials/slides-114-
dinrg-draft-report-of-dinrg-workshop-on-centralization-in-the-
internet-01.pdf
[4] Design Expectations vs. Deployment Reality in Protocol
Development Workshop 2019, Internet Architecture Board
https://www.iab.org/activities/workshops/dedr-
workshop/position-papers/
[5] Consolidation In the Internet Economy, Internet Society, 2019.
https://future.internetsociety.org/2019/consolidation-in-the-
internet-economy
[6] IBID page 5.
[7] Journal of Cyber Policy, Volume 5, Issue 1 (2020) Special
Issue: Consolidation of the Internet
(https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rcyb20/5/1)
[8] An Empirical View on Consolidation of the Web, Trinh Viet
Doan, Roland van Rijswijk-Deij, Oliver Hohlfeld, and Vaibhav
Bajpai. 2022. ACM Trans. Internet Technol. 22, 3, Article 70
(February 2022),
https://vaibhavbajpai.com/documents/papers/proceedings/web-
consolidation-toit-2022.pdf
[9] IBID page 70:3
[10] RFC 8890, The Internet is for End Users. Nottingham, Mark.
August 2020. https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8890
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 9]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
10. Acknowledgments
Many thanks to all who discussed this with us in DINRG in 2021 and
2022.
This document was prepared using 2-Word-v2.0.template.dot.
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 10]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
Authors' Addresses
Mark McFadden
Internet policy advisors ltd
Chepstow, Wales, UK
Email: mark@internetpolicyadvisors.com
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 11]
Independent Submission M. McFadden
Internet Draft Internet policy advisors, ltd
October 24, 2022
Intended status: Informational
Expires: April 23, 2023
A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation
draft-mcfadden-consolidation-taxonomy-00.txt
Status of this Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that
other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-
Drafts.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six
months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents
at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as
reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at
http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt
The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at
http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html
This Internet-Draft will expire on April 23, 2023.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2022 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
(http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
publication of this document. Please review these documents
carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with
respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this
document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in
Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without
warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License.
McFadden Expires April 23, 2021 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
Abstract
This document contributes to the ongoing discussion surrounding
Internet consolidation. At recent IETF meetings discussions about
Internet consolidation revealed that different perspectives gave
completely different views of what consolidation means. While we use
the term consolidation to refer to the process of increasing control
over Internet infrastructure and services by a small set of
organizations, it is clear that that control is expressed through
economic, network traffic and protocol concerns. As a contribution
to the discussion surrounding consolidation, this document attempts
to provide a taxonomy of Internet consolidation with the goal of
adding clarity to a complex discussion.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction - Why a Taxonomy?.................................2
2. Background to Consolidation Issues.............................3
3. Economic Consolidation.........................................4
3.1. Economic Revenue Consolidation............................4
3.2. Economic Flow Consolidation...............................5
4. Traffic and Infrastructure Consolidation.......................5
5. Architectural Consolidation....................................6
5.1. The Rise of Intermediaries................................6
5.2. Vertical Architectural Consolidation......................7
5.3. Standards Development.....................................7
6. Service and Application Consolidation..........................8
7. Security Considerations........................................8
8. IANA Considerations............................................8
9. References.....................................................9
9.1. Informative References....................................9
10. Acknowledgments..............................................10
1. Introduction - Why a Taxonomy?
Internet consolidation has been under discussion for the last
several years. The 2019 Internet Society's "Global Internet Report:
Consolidation and the Internet Economy" highlighted issues on this
topic and kicked started a series of discussions and publications
around consolidation. The DINRG Workshop on Centralization took
place in June of 2021 and was reported on at IETF 114. Furthermore,
a draft for the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) discussed issues
of economic and technical consolidation. [1] Despite community
interest, the draft expired without further work or publication.
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 2]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
Several other contributions have focused on responses to
consolidation. However, the report from the DINRG Workshop makes
clear that there are different "categories of centralization." This
draft does not attempt to propose responses to centralization,
instead it attempts to build upon the Workshop's summary of
"categories of centralization" with a goal of supporting future work
and discussion.
2. Background to Consolidation Issues
Internet consolidation is "the process of increasing control over
internet infrastructure and services by a small set of
organizations." [2] Economy of scale is the driving force behind
consolidation because markets naturally consolidate when economies
of scale come into play.
The DINRG Workshop Report notes that:
"- the economy of scale enables one to generate the same service
outcome with far lower production costs, and consume fewer resources
for each instance of the service transaction.
- a large user pool produces big data which helps improve service
customization for each user, letting bigger companies gain an edge
over smaller competitors.
- centralized application developments reduce the number of
platforms, hence substantially reduce the cost in development and
maintenance, and circumvent interoperability issues. Consolidated
development and operational efforts also help mitigate technical
expertise shortages.
- most of all, monopoly players can dictate to the market the terms
of the service and the service price bought to the market, which
causes longer term stagnation of the market and increased
inefficiency within the market, which acts as a drag on further
innovation."
The current consolidation and centralization of control and
operation of Internet infrastructure and services was not an
original design goal. In fact, RFC1958 says:
"This allows for uniform and relatively seamless operations in a
competitive, multi-vendor, multi-provider public network."
and later,
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 3]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
"Heterogeneity is inevitable and must be supported by design."[3]
Much of the discussion surrounding consolidation focuses on Internet
services, applications and data.[4] However, contributions to the
discussion of consolidation have also addressed economic, traffic
and architectural consolidation. In recognition of this, a taxonomy
with four main categories is proposed:
- Economic Consolidation
- Traffic and Infrastructure Consolidation
- Architectural Consolidation
- Service and Application Consolidation
3. Economic Consolidation
The Internet Society Report on Internet Consolidation suggests that
the Internet's economy is defined as the economic activities that
either support the Internet or are fundamentally dependent on the
Internet's existence.
As a result, economic consolidation on the Internet refers to the
effects of market consolidation on competition and the economic
power of a small set of companies that dominate economic activity in
the Internet. There are two aspects to economic consolidation on the
Internet.
Economic consolidation means that a small number of companies
dominate the marketplace and hence, the revenues gathered from the
use of the Internet.
Economic consolidation also means that a small number of companies
control the flow of capital among enterprises that provide services
on the Internet.
3.1. Economic Revenue Consolidation
One of the two aspects of economic consolidation is the generation
of revenue by a small number of enterprises. As an example, Amazon
accounts for more than 45% of all online retail spending in the
United States. Alibaba is estimated to have 60% or the electronic
commerce market in China. Meta - including Facebook, Messenger,
WhatsApp and Instagram - dominates social media and messaging
holding four of the world's top six social media platforms. [6]
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 4]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
In each of these cases, a very small number of companies operate
extremely popular services, concentrating revenue generation into
those companies. In fact, the popularity of these services is so
great that value is created by adding other, complementary services
onto the base they provide. The dominant services thus control the
foundation upon which other revenue streams are built. [7]
3.2. Economic Flow Consolidation
In addition to revenue generation, the very large application layer
companies (Alphabet, Amazon, Tencent, Meta and Alibaba) control how
money and capital moves through enterprises providing services on
the Internet.
We have seen that embedded intermediaries that have substantial
power can implement platforms that provide services to downstream
consumers as well as upstream sources of content and applications.
As the controlling intermediary for those services and applications,
these large companies are also able to dictate how economic flows
move between consumers and providers of applications and services.
Regulators and policy makers often are concerned about the enormous
market power that these huge intermediaries have, but refrain from
imposing controls or sanctions on the grounds that consumers get
significant benefits when platform operators use upstream revenues
to subsidize downstream services.
4. Traffic and Infrastructure Consolidation
A significant majority of the Internet's traffic is delivered from
very large content services including Google, Amazon and Facebook.
These companies naturally attempt to provide the best possible
service for their customers - including perceived speed of content
delivery - these content services seek to establish connections
directly with the companies providing access to the network. The
result is a "flattening" of the Internet's traditional topology.
In fact, a recent study shows that these large services can reach
more than 76% of the Internet without having to traverse traditional
Tier 1 and Tier 2 ISPs. Besides bringing benefits of low latency and
higher security to their uses, these large-scale networks are also
able to implement improvements and innovations in protocol design by
having far greater control over the elements of the infrastructure
being used to deliver services.
An empirical view of this consolidation in February of 2022 [8]
shows that the number of webpages that are hosted on these networks
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 5]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
has increased from 2015 to 2020 at a rate exceeding 80%. In looking
at data sources including TLD datasets and Alexa Top 1M datasets
only a small number of content delivery networks host the vast
majority of landing pages.
Centralization of this sort makes traffic filtering easier since
forcing a content network to block specific content (or worse,
blocking the content network entirely) would make a large amount of
the content unavailable. As these networks begin to migrate other
services to HTTP (for instance, DNS over HTTP), more than the web is
affected by the impacts of filtering by centralized content
services. In fact, blocking a content network entirely would block
all the content of the network, not just the content that was the
target of the filtering.
This happens at all layers. As an example at the application layer,
in 2021 Google and Apple were forced to remove applications created
by the Russian political opposition from their stores. The ability
of a government to influence the content network means that
centralization can lead to a reduction in the diversity of
information or services on the Internet.
As the content networks grow in scale, the networks themselves grow
to support the required network capacity. This sets up a feedback
look that drives market concentration toward the infrastructure
provided by the content networks. As these networks grow larger, it
becomes difficult for smaller networks and infrastructure providers
to compete with the economies of scale from which the large networks
benefit.
5. Architectural Consolidation
A third category of consolidation is the evolution of the Internet's
architecture to meet contemporary use cases and requirements. Early
descriptions of the Internet's architecture described heterogeneous
endpoints connected by neutral transports. The end-to-end principle
suggested that the transport of data between endpoints was provided
without much intervention. [10]
Two developments have led to architectural consolidation: the
emergence of intermediary services and the movement of transport
related code to the application layer.
5.1. The Rise of Intermediaries
In the first case, technologies like CDNs are built into the network
for the efficient delivery of content and services. The consumer is
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 6]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
largely unaware that the service or application is being hosted by
an organization other than they one they think they contacted.
Instead, content delivery is pushed as close to the consumer as
possible to ensure that the end-user experience is as optimal as
possible.
The result is a series of security, economic and policy concerns
associated with the small number of very large providers of these
intermediary services. However, in this section we only want to
consider the architectural issues specific to the use of
intermediaries.
5.2. Vertical Architectural Consolidation
The second case is vertical architectural consolidation. This is
where the companies that control the applications attempt to control
all aspects of the communication. For instance, the provider of the
browser may be the organization that the browser connects to. The
advantage of this kind of architectural consolidation is that it
allows the largest players to introduce technological innovation
more quickly than if multiple layers of the stack required
innovation in parallel.
With tools like DNS over HTTPS, we see applications taking control
of the infrastructure of transport in addition to providing an
application or service. Applications essentially provide their own
ecosystem (from centralized control of DNS services all the way to
the end-user experience).
5.3. Standards Development
Others have rightly observed that, in the current environment,
development of protocols and standards for the Internet is largely
confined to a small number of participants from a small number of
organizations. One trend is that the giant enterprises on the
Internet also dominate the development of protocols.
Having a small number of organizations controlling the
infrastructure of the Internet also means that innovative
technologies can be implemented quickly and at large-scale. In 2022,
a study in the ACM Transactions on Internet Technology found that
Google accounting for 60% of all TLS 1.3 secured resources. Some
other, large CDNs use TLS 1.3 almost exclusively. QUIC is also an
example of a new technology that profits from consolidation. Large
scale intermediaries can facilitate the deployment and adoption of
new standards because the decision for the adoption is propagated
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 7]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
across the infrastructure instead of through user adoption or
feature updates.
6. Service and Application Consolidation
Services and applications are those tools that users see when they
interact with the Internet. They take advantage of the
infrastructure (and, access) parts of the Internet's ecosystem.
According to the Internet Society's report on consolidation, "a
small number of companies operating some of the Internet's most
popular services dominate this market. Many of these companies act
as multi-sided markets or platforms, meaning they offer a base upon
which other applications, processes or technologies can be
developed."
By itself, Google holds 90% of the global search market, the number
one mobile operating system (Android), the top-user-generated video
platform and has more than 1.5 billion active users of its Gmail
email service. Google also has a map service, a public DNS resolver
service, a cloud service and a document store.
While twenty years ago, an application would simply rely on the
underlying operating system to provide its communications and
transport services, now applications and services do this for
themselves. This is a case of the intermediary or platform providing
the application integrating all the necessary components for
providing a service on the Internet.
7. Security Considerations
While this document does not describe a specific protocol, it does
discuss the evolving architecture of the Internet. Changes to the
Internet's architecture have direct and indirect implications for
the Internet's threat model. In another draft [20]REFERENCE, we
discuss how the evolution of the Internet has changed the threat
model. Specifically, the changes to the end-to-end model (see
section 4.2 above) have inserted new interfaces which must be
reflected in security considerations for new protocols.
8. IANA Considerations
This memo contains no instructions or requests for IANA. Conclusions
This document seeks to rekindle and restart the discussion on
consolidation. As argued above, Internet consolidation is happening
at different places and different layers of the Internet. Though
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 8]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
there has been interest in the Internet consolidation in the past,
now is the time to start the discussions again.
9. References
9.1. Informative References
[1] Considerations on Internet Consolidation and the Internet
Architecture [draft-arkko-iab-internet-consolidation-02].
[2] IBID
[3] Draft Report of DINRG Workshop on Centralization in the
Internet, June 3, 2021, Huitema, Huston, Kutscher, Zhang,
https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/114/materials/slides-114-
dinrg-draft-report-of-dinrg-workshop-on-centralization-in-the-
internet-01.pdf
[4] Design Expectations vs. Deployment Reality in Protocol
Development Workshop 2019, Internet Architecture Board
https://www.iab.org/activities/workshops/dedr-
workshop/position-papers/
[5] Consolidation In the Internet Economy, Internet Society, 2019.
https://future.internetsociety.org/2019/consolidation-in-the-
internet-economy
[6] IBID page 5.
[7] Journal of Cyber Policy, Volume 5, Issue 1 (2020) Special
Issue: Consolidation of the Internet
(https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rcyb20/5/1)
[8] An Empirical View on Consolidation of the Web, Trinh Viet
Doan, Roland van Rijswijk-Deij, Oliver Hohlfeld, and Vaibhav
Bajpai. 2022. ACM Trans. Internet Technol. 22, 3, Article 70
(February 2022),
https://vaibhavbajpai.com/documents/papers/proceedings/web-
consolidation-toit-2022.pdf
[9] IBID page 70:3
[10] RFC 8890, The Internet is for End Users. Nottingham, Mark.
August 2020. https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8890
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10. Acknowledgments
Many thanks to all who discussed this with us in DINRG in 2021 and
2022.
This document was prepared using 2-Word-v2.0.template.dot.
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 10]
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Authors' Addresses
Mark McFadden
Internet policy advisors ltd
Chepstow, Wales, UK
Email: mark@internetpolicyadvisors.com
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 11]
Independent Submission M. McFadden
Internet Draft Internet policy advisors, ltd
October 24, 2022
Intended status: Informational
Expires: April 23, 2023
A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation
draft-mcfadden-consolidation-taxonomy-00.txt
Status of this Memo
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McFadden Expires April 23, 2021 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
Abstract
This document contributes to the ongoing discussion surrounding
Internet consolidation. At recent IETF meetings discussions about
Internet consolidation revealed that different perspectives gave
completely different views of what consolidation means. While we use
the term consolidation to refer to the process of increasing control
over Internet infrastructure and services by a small set of
organizations, it is clear that that control is expressed through
economic, network traffic and protocol concerns. As a contribution
to the discussion surrounding consolidation, this document attempts
to provide a taxonomy of Internet consolidation with the goal of
adding clarity to a complex discussion.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction ? Why a Taxonomy?.................................2
2. Background to Consolidation Issues.............................3
3. Economic Consolidation.........................................4
3.1. Economic Revenue Consolidation............................4
3.2. Economic Flow Consolidation...............................5
4. Traffic and Infrastructure Consolidation.......................5
5. Architectural Consolidation....................................6
5.1. The Rise of Intermediaries................................6
5.2. Vertical Architectural Consolidation......................7
5.3. Standards Development.....................................7
6. Service and Application Consolidation..........................8
7. Security Considerations........................................8
8. IANA Considerations............................................8
9. References.....................................................9
9.1. Informative References....................................9
10. Acknowledgments..............................................10
1. Introduction ? Why a Taxonomy?
Internet consolidation has been under discussion for the last
several years. The 2019 Internet Society's "Global Internet Report:
Consolidation and the Internet Economy" highlighted issues on this
topic and kicked started a series of discussions and publications
around consolidation. The DINRG Workshop on Centralization took
place in June of 2021 and was reported on at IETF 114. Furthermore,
a draft for the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) discussed issues
of economic and technical consolidation. [1] Despite community
interest, the draft expired without further work or publication.
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 2]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
Several other contributions have focused on responses to
consolidation. However, the report from the DINRG Workshop makes
clear that there are different "categories of centralization." This
draft does not attempt to propose responses to centralization,
instead it attempts to build upon the Workshop's summary of
"categories of centralization" with a goal of supporting future work
and discussion.
2. Background to Consolidation Issues
Internet consolidation is "the process of increasing control over
internet infrastructure and services by a small set of
organizations." [2] Economy of scale is the driving force behind
consolidation because markets naturally consolidate when economies
of scale come into play.
The DINRG Workshop Report notes that:
"- the economy of scale enables one to generate the same service
outcome with far lower production costs, and consume fewer resources
for each instance of the service transaction.
- a large user pool produces big data which helps improve service
customization for each user, letting bigger companies gain an edge
over smaller competitors.
- centralized application developments reduce the number of
platforms, hence substantially reduce the cost in development and
maintenance, and circumvent interoperability issues. Consolidated
development and operational efforts also help mitigate technical
expertise shortages.
- most of all, monopoly players can dictate to the market the terms
of the service and the service price bought to the market, which
causes longer term stagnation of the market and increased
inefficiency within the market, which acts as a drag on further
innovation."
The current consolidation and centralization of control and
operation of Internet infrastructure and services was not an
original design goal. In fact, RFC1958 says:
"This allows for uniform and relatively seamless operations in a
competitive, multi-vendor, multi-provider public network."
and later,
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 3]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
"Heterogeneity is inevitable and must be supported by design."[3]
Much of the discussion surrounding consolidation focuses on Internet
services, applications and data.[4] However, contributions to the
discussion of consolidation have also addressed economic, traffic
and architectural consolidation. In recognition of this, a taxonomy
with four main categories is proposed:
- Economic Consolidation
- Traffic and Infrastructure Consolidation
- Architectural Consolidation
- Service and Application Consolidation
3. Economic Consolidation
The Internet Society Report on Internet Consolidation suggests that
the Internet's economy is defined as the economic activities that
either support the Internet or are fundamentally dependent on the
Internet's existence.
As a result, economic consolidation on the Internet refers to the
effects of market consolidation on competition and the economic
power of a small set of companies that dominate economic activity in
the Internet. There are two aspects to economic consolidation on the
Internet.
Economic consolidation means that a small number of companies
dominate the marketplace and hence, the revenues gathered from the
use of the Internet.
Economic consolidation also means that a small number of companies
control the flow of capital among enterprises that provide services
on the Internet.
3.1. Economic Revenue Consolidation
One of the two aspects of economic consolidation is the generation
of revenue by a small number of enterprises. As an example, Amazon
accounts for more than 45% of all online retail spending in the
United States. Alibaba is estimated to have 60% or the electronic
commerce market in China. Meta ? including Facebook, Messenger,
WhatsApp and Instagram ? dominates social media and messaging
holding four of the world's top six social media platforms. [6]
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 4]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
In each of these cases, a very small number of companies operate
extremely popular services, concentrating revenue generation into
those companies. In fact, the popularity of these services is so
great that value is created by adding other, complementary services
onto the base they provide. The dominant services thus control the
foundation upon which other revenue streams are built. [7]
3.2. Economic Flow Consolidation
In addition to revenue generation, the very large application layer
companies (Alphabet, Amazon, Tencent, Meta and Alibaba) control how
money and capital moves through enterprises providing services on
the Internet.
We have seen that embedded intermediaries that have substantial
power can implement platforms that provide services to downstream
consumers as well as upstream sources of content and applications.
As the controlling intermediary for those services and applications,
these large companies are also able to dictate how economic flows
move between consumers and providers of applications and services.
Regulators and policy makers often are concerned about the enormous
market power that these huge intermediaries have, but refrain from
imposing controls or sanctions on the grounds that consumers get
significant benefits when platform operators use upstream revenues
to subsidize downstream services.
4. Traffic and Infrastructure Consolidation
A significant majority of the Internet's traffic is delivered from
very large content services including Google, Amazon and Facebook.
These companies naturally attempt to provide the best possible
service for their customers ? including perceived speed of content
delivery ? these content services seek to establish connections
directly with the companies providing access to the network. The
result is a "flattening" of the Internet's traditional topology.
In fact, a recent study shows that these large services can reach
more than 76% of the Internet without having to traverse traditional
Tier 1 and Tier 2 ISPs. Besides bringing benefits of low latency and
higher security to their uses, these large-scale networks are also
able to implement improvements and innovations in protocol design by
having far greater control over the elements of the infrastructure
being used to deliver services.
An empirical view of this consolidation in February of 2022 [8]
shows that the number of webpages that are hosted on these networks
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 5]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
has increased from 2015 to 2020 at a rate exceeding 80%. In looking
at data sources including TLD datasets and Alexa Top 1M datasets
only a small number of content delivery networks host the vast
majority of landing pages.
Centralization of this sort makes traffic filtering easier since
forcing a content network to block specific content (or worse,
blocking the content network entirely) would make a large amount of
the content unavailable. As these networks begin to migrate other
services to HTTP (for instance, DNS over HTTP), more than the web is
affected by the impacts of filtering by centralized content
services. In fact, blocking a content network entirely would block
all the content of the network, not just the content that was the
target of the filtering.
This happens at all layers. As an example at the application layer,
in 2021 Google and Apple were forced to remove applications created
by the Russian political opposition from their stores. The ability
of a government to influence the content network means that
centralization can lead to a reduction in the diversity of
information or services on the Internet.
As the content networks grow in scale, the networks themselves grow
to support the required network capacity. This sets up a feedback
look that drives market concentration toward the infrastructure
provided by the content networks. As these networks grow larger, it
becomes difficult for smaller networks and infrastructure providers
to compete with the economies of scale from which the large networks
benefit.
5. Architectural Consolidation
A third category of consolidation is the evolution of the Internet's
architecture to meet contemporary use cases and requirements. Early
descriptions of the Internet's architecture described heterogeneous
endpoints connected by neutral transports. The end-to-end principle
suggested that the transport of data between endpoints was provided
without much intervention. [10]
Two developments have led to architectural consolidation: the
emergence of intermediary services and the movement of transport
related code to the application layer.
5.1. The Rise of Intermediaries
In the first case, technologies like CDNs are built into the network
for the efficient delivery of content and services. The consumer is
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 6]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
largely unaware that the service or application is being hosted by
an organization other than they one they think they contacted.
Instead, content delivery is pushed as close to the consumer as
possible to ensure that the end-user experience is as optimal as
possible.
The result is a series of security, economic and policy concerns
associated with the small number of very large providers of these
intermediary services. However, in this section we only want to
consider the architectural issues specific to the use of
intermediaries.
5.2. Vertical Architectural Consolidation
The second case is vertical architectural consolidation. This is
where the companies that control the applications attempt to control
all aspects of the communication. For instance, the provider of the
browser may be the organization that the browser connects to. The
advantage of this kind of architectural consolidation is that it
allows the largest players to introduce technological innovation
more quickly than if multiple layers of the stack required
innovation in parallel.
With tools like DNS over HTTPS, we see applications taking control
of the infrastructure of transport in addition to providing an
application or service. Applications essentially provide their own
ecosystem (from centralized control of DNS services all the way to
the end-user experience).
5.3. Standards Development
Others have rightly observed that, in the current environment,
development of protocols and standards for the Internet is largely
confined to a small number of participants from a small number of
organizations. One trend is that the giant enterprises on the
Internet also dominate the development of protocols.
Having a small number of organizations controlling the
infrastructure of the Internet also means that innovative
technologies can be implemented quickly and at large-scale. In 2022,
a study in the ACM Transactions on Internet Technology found that
Google accounting for 60% of all TLS 1.3 secured resources. Some
other, large CDNs use TLS 1.3 almost exclusively. QUIC is also an
example of a new technology that profits from consolidation. Large
scale intermediaries can facilitate the deployment and adoption of
new standards because the decision for the adoption is propagated
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 7]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
across the infrastructure instead of through user adoption or
feature updates.
6. Service and Application Consolidation
Services and applications are those tools that users see when they
interact with the Internet. They take advantage of the
infrastructure (and, access) parts of the Internet's ecosystem.
According to the Internet Society's report on consolidation, "a
small number of companies operating some of the Internet's most
popular services dominate this market. Many of these companies act
as multi-sided markets or platforms, meaning they offer a base upon
which other applications, processes or technologies can be
developed."
By itself, Google holds 90% of the global search market, the number
one mobile operating system (Android), the top-user-generated video
platform and has more than 1.5 billion active users of its Gmail
email service. Google also has a map service, a public DNS resolver
service, a cloud service and a document store.
While twenty years ago, an application would simply rely on the
underlying operating system to provide its communications and
transport services, now applications and services do this for
themselves. This is a case of the intermediary or platform providing
the application integrating all the necessary components for
providing a service on the Internet.
7. Security Considerations
While this document does not describe a specific protocol, it does
discuss the evolving architecture of the Internet. Changes to the
Internet's architecture have direct and indirect implications for
the Internet's threat model. In another draft [20]REFERENCE, we
discuss how the evolution of the Internet has changed the threat
model. Specifically, the changes to the end-to-end model (see
section 4.2 above) have inserted new interfaces which must be
reflected in security considerations for new protocols.
8. IANA Considerations
This memo contains no instructions or requests for IANA. Conclusions
This document seeks to rekindle and restart the discussion on
consolidation. As argued above, Internet consolidation is happening
at different places and different layers of the Internet. Though
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 8]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
there has been interest in the Internet consolidation in the past,
now is the time to start the discussions again.
9. References
9.1. Informative References
[1] Considerations on Internet Consolidation and the Internet
Architecture [draft-arkko-iab-internet-consolidation-02].
[2] IBID
[3] Draft Report of DINRG Workshop on Centralization in the
Internet, June 3, 2021, Huitema, Huston, Kutscher, Zhang,
https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/114/materials/slides-114-
dinrg-draft-report-of-dinrg-workshop-on-centralization-in-the-
internet-01.pdf
[4] Design Expectations vs. Deployment Reality in Protocol
Development Workshop 2019, Internet Architecture Board
https://www.iab.org/activities/workshops/dedr-
workshop/position-papers/
[5] Consolidation In the Internet Economy, Internet Society, 2019.
https://future.internetsociety.org/2019/consolidation-in-the-
internet-economy
[6] IBID page 5.
[7] Journal of Cyber Policy, Volume 5, Issue 1 (2020) Special
Issue: Consolidation of the Internet
(https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rcyb20/5/1)
[8] An Empirical View on Consolidation of the Web, Trinh Viet
Doan, Roland van Rijswijk-Deij, Oliver Hohlfeld, and Vaibhav
Bajpai. 2022. ACM Trans. Internet Technol. 22, 3, Article 70
(February 2022),
https://vaibhavbajpai.com/documents/papers/proceedings/web-
consolidation-toit-2022.pdf
[9] IBID page 70:3
[10] RFC 8890, The Internet is for End Users. Nottingham, Mark.
August 2020. https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8890
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 9]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
10. Acknowledgments
Many thanks to all who discussed this with us in DINRG in 2021 and
2022.
This document was prepared using 2-Word-v2.0.template.dot.
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 10]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
Authors' Addresses
Mark McFadden
Internet policy advisors ltd
Chepstow, Wales, UK
Email: mark@internetpolicyadvisors.com
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 11]
Independent Submission M. McFadden
Internet Draft Internet policy advisors, ltd
October 24, 2022
Intended status: Informational
Expires: April 23, 2023
A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation
draft-mcfadden-consolidation-taxonomy-00.txt
Status of this Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that
other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-
Drafts.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six
months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents
at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as
reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at
http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt
The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at
http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html
This Internet-Draft will expire on April 23, 2023.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2022 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
(http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
publication of this document. Please review these documents
carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with
respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this
document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in
Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without
warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License.
McFadden Expires April 23, 2021 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
Abstract
This document contributes to the ongoing discussion surrounding
Internet consolidation. At recent IETF meetings discussions about
Internet consolidation revealed that different perspectives gave
completely different views of what consolidation means. While we use
the term consolidation to refer to the process of increasing control
over Internet infrastructure and services by a small set of
organizations, it is clear that that control is expressed through
economic, network traffic and protocol concerns. As a contribution
to the discussion surrounding consolidation, this document attempts
to provide a taxonomy of Internet consolidation with the goal of
adding clarity to a complex discussion.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction ? Why a Taxonomy?.................................2
2. Background to Consolidation Issues.............................3
3. Economic Consolidation.........................................4
3.1. Economic Revenue Consolidation............................4
3.2. Economic Flow Consolidation...............................5
4. Traffic and Infrastructure Consolidation.......................5
5. Architectural Consolidation....................................6
5.1. The Rise of Intermediaries................................6
5.2. Vertical Architectural Consolidation......................7
5.3. Standards Development.....................................7
6. Service and Application Consolidation..........................8
7. Security Considerations........................................8
8. IANA Considerations............................................8
9. References.....................................................9
9.1. Informative References....................................9
10. Acknowledgments..............................................10
1. Introduction ? Why a Taxonomy?
Internet consolidation has been under discussion for the last
several years. The 2019 Internet Society's "Global Internet Report:
Consolidation and the Internet Economy" highlighted issues on this
topic and kicked started a series of discussions and publications
around consolidation. The DINRG Workshop on Centralization took
place in June of 2021 and was reported on at IETF 114. Furthermore,
a draft for the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) discussed issues
of economic and technical consolidation. [1] Despite community
interest, the draft expired without further work or publication.
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 2]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
Several other contributions have focused on responses to
consolidation. However, the report from the DINRG Workshop makes
clear that there are different "categories of centralization." This
draft does not attempt to propose responses to centralization,
instead it attempts to build upon the Workshop's summary of
"categories of centralization" with a goal of supporting future work
and discussion.
2. Background to Consolidation Issues
Internet consolidation is "the process of increasing control over
internet infrastructure and services by a small set of
organizations." [2] Economy of scale is the driving force behind
consolidation because markets naturally consolidate when economies
of scale come into play.
The DINRG Workshop Report notes that:
"- the economy of scale enables one to generate the same service
outcome with far lower production costs, and consume fewer resources
for each instance of the service transaction.
- a large user pool produces big data which helps improve service
customization for each user, letting bigger companies gain an edge
over smaller competitors.
- centralized application developments reduce the number of
platforms, hence substantially reduce the cost in development and
maintenance, and circumvent interoperability issues. Consolidated
development and operational efforts also help mitigate technical
expertise shortages.
- most of all, monopoly players can dictate to the market the terms
of the service and the service price bought to the market, which
causes longer term stagnation of the market and increased
inefficiency within the market, which acts as a drag on further
innovation."
The current consolidation and centralization of control and
operation of Internet infrastructure and services was not an
original design goal. In fact, RFC1958 says:
"This allows for uniform and relatively seamless operations in a
competitive, multi-vendor, multi-provider public network."
and later,
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 3]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
"Heterogeneity is inevitable and must be supported by design."[3]
Much of the discussion surrounding consolidation focuses on Internet
services, applications and data.[4] However, contributions to the
discussion of consolidation have also addressed economic, traffic
and architectural consolidation. In recognition of this, a taxonomy
with four main categories is proposed:
- Economic Consolidation
- Traffic and Infrastructure Consolidation
- Architectural Consolidation
- Service and Application Consolidation
3. Economic Consolidation
The Internet Society Report on Internet Consolidation suggests that
the Internet's economy is defined as the economic activities that
either support the Internet or are fundamentally dependent on the
Internet's existence.
As a result, economic consolidation on the Internet refers to the
effects of market consolidation on competition and the economic
power of a small set of companies that dominate economic activity in
the Internet. There are two aspects to economic consolidation on the
Internet.
Economic consolidation means that a small number of companies
dominate the marketplace and hence, the revenues gathered from the
use of the Internet.
Economic consolidation also means that a small number of companies
control the flow of capital among enterprises that provide services
on the Internet.
3.1. Economic Revenue Consolidation
One of the two aspects of economic consolidation is the generation
of revenue by a small number of enterprises. As an example, Amazon
accounts for more than 45% of all online retail spending in the
United States. Alibaba is estimated to have 60% or the electronic
commerce market in China. Meta ? including Facebook, Messenger,
WhatsApp and Instagram ? dominates social media and messaging
holding four of the world's top six social media platforms. [6]
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 4]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
In each of these cases, a very small number of companies operate
extremely popular services, concentrating revenue generation into
those companies. In fact, the popularity of these services is so
great that value is created by adding other, complementary services
onto the base they provide. The dominant services thus control the
foundation upon which other revenue streams are built. [7]
3.2. Economic Flow Consolidation
In addition to revenue generation, the very large application layer
companies (Alphabet, Amazon, Tencent, Meta and Alibaba) control how
money and capital moves through enterprises providing services on
the Internet.
We have seen that embedded intermediaries that have substantial
power can implement platforms that provide services to downstream
consumers as well as upstream sources of content and applications.
As the controlling intermediary for those services and applications,
these large companies are also able to dictate how economic flows
move between consumers and providers of applications and services.
Regulators and policy makers often are concerned about the enormous
market power that these huge intermediaries have, but refrain from
imposing controls or sanctions on the grounds that consumers get
significant benefits when platform operators use upstream revenues
to subsidize downstream services.
4. Traffic and Infrastructure Consolidation
A significant majority of the Internet's traffic is delivered from
very large content services including Google, Amazon and Facebook.
These companies naturally attempt to provide the best possible
service for their customers ? including perceived speed of content
delivery ? these content services seek to establish connections
directly with the companies providing access to the network. The
result is a "flattening" of the Internet's traditional topology.
In fact, a recent study shows that these large services can reach
more than 76% of the Internet without having to traverse traditional
Tier 1 and Tier 2 ISPs. Besides bringing benefits of low latency and
higher security to their uses, these large-scale networks are also
able to implement improvements and innovations in protocol design by
having far greater control over the elements of the infrastructure
being used to deliver services.
An empirical view of this consolidation in February of 2022 [8]
shows that the number of webpages that are hosted on these networks
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 5]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
has increased from 2015 to 2020 at a rate exceeding 80%. In looking
at data sources including TLD datasets and Alexa Top 1M datasets
only a small number of content delivery networks host the vast
majority of landing pages.
Centralization of this sort makes traffic filtering easier since
forcing a content network to block specific content (or worse,
blocking the content network entirely) would make a large amount of
the content unavailable. As these networks begin to migrate other
services to HTTP (for instance, DNS over HTTP), more than the web is
affected by the impacts of filtering by centralized content
services. In fact, blocking a content network entirely would block
all the content of the network, not just the content that was the
target of the filtering.
This happens at all layers. As an example at the application layer,
in 2021 Google and Apple were forced to remove applications created
by the Russian political opposition from their stores. The ability
of a government to influence the content network means that
centralization can lead to a reduction in the diversity of
information or services on the Internet.
As the content networks grow in scale, the networks themselves grow
to support the required network capacity. This sets up a feedback
look that drives market concentration toward the infrastructure
provided by the content networks. As these networks grow larger, it
becomes difficult for smaller networks and infrastructure providers
to compete with the economies of scale from which the large networks
benefit.
5. Architectural Consolidation
A third category of consolidation is the evolution of the Internet's
architecture to meet contemporary use cases and requirements. Early
descriptions of the Internet's architecture described heterogeneous
endpoints connected by neutral transports. The end-to-end principle
suggested that the transport of data between endpoints was provided
without much intervention. [10]
Two developments have led to architectural consolidation: the
emergence of intermediary services and the movement of transport
related code to the application layer.
5.1. The Rise of Intermediaries
In the first case, technologies like CDNs are built into the network
for the efficient delivery of content and services. The consumer is
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 6]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
largely unaware that the service or application is being hosted by
an organization other than they one they think they contacted.
Instead, content delivery is pushed as close to the consumer as
possible to ensure that the end-user experience is as optimal as
possible.
The result is a series of security, economic and policy concerns
associated with the small number of very large providers of these
intermediary services. However, in this section we only want to
consider the architectural issues specific to the use of
intermediaries.
5.2. Vertical Architectural Consolidation
The second case is vertical architectural consolidation. This is
where the companies that control the applications attempt to control
all aspects of the communication. For instance, the provider of the
browser may be the organization that the browser connects to. The
advantage of this kind of architectural consolidation is that it
allows the largest players to introduce technological innovation
more quickly than if multiple layers of the stack required
innovation in parallel.
With tools like DNS over HTTPS, we see applications taking control
of the infrastructure of transport in addition to providing an
application or service. Applications essentially provide their own
ecosystem (from centralized control of DNS services all the way to
the end-user experience).
5.3. Standards Development
Others have rightly observed that, in the current environment,
development of protocols and standards for the Internet is largely
confined to a small number of participants from a small number of
organizations. One trend is that the giant enterprises on the
Internet also dominate the development of protocols.
Having a small number of organizations controlling the
infrastructure of the Internet also means that innovative
technologies can be implemented quickly and at large-scale. In 2022,
a study in the ACM Transactions on Internet Technology found that
Google accounting for 60% of all TLS 1.3 secured resources. Some
other, large CDNs use TLS 1.3 almost exclusively. QUIC is also an
example of a new technology that profits from consolidation. Large
scale intermediaries can facilitate the deployment and adoption of
new standards because the decision for the adoption is propagated
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 7]
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across the infrastructure instead of through user adoption or
feature updates.
6. Service and Application Consolidation
Services and applications are those tools that users see when they
interact with the Internet. They take advantage of the
infrastructure (and, access) parts of the Internet's ecosystem.
According to the Internet Society's report on consolidation, "a
small number of companies operating some of the Internet's most
popular services dominate this market. Many of these companies act
as multi-sided markets or platforms, meaning they offer a base upon
which other applications, processes or technologies can be
developed."
By itself, Google holds 90% of the global search market, the number
one mobile operating system (Android), the top-user-generated video
platform and has more than 1.5 billion active users of its Gmail
email service. Google also has a map service, a public DNS resolver
service, a cloud service and a document store.
While twenty years ago, an application would simply rely on the
underlying operating system to provide its communications and
transport services, now applications and services do this for
themselves. This is a case of the intermediary or platform providing
the application integrating all the necessary components for
providing a service on the Internet.
7. Security Considerations
While this document does not describe a specific protocol, it does
discuss the evolving architecture of the Internet. Changes to the
Internet's architecture have direct and indirect implications for
the Internet's threat model. In another draft [20]REFERENCE, we
discuss how the evolution of the Internet has changed the threat
model. Specifically, the changes to the end-to-end model (see
section 4.2 above) have inserted new interfaces which must be
reflected in security considerations for new protocols.
8. IANA Considerations
This memo contains no instructions or requests for IANA. Conclusions
This document seeks to rekindle and restart the discussion on
consolidation. As argued above, Internet consolidation is happening
at different places and different layers of the Internet. Though
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 8]
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there has been interest in the Internet consolidation in the past,
now is the time to start the discussions again.
9. References
9.1. Informative References
[1] Considerations on Internet Consolidation and the Internet
Architecture [draft-arkko-iab-internet-consolidation-02].
[2] IBID
[3] Draft Report of DINRG Workshop on Centralization in the
Internet, June 3, 2021, Huitema, Huston, Kutscher, Zhang,
https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/114/materials/slides-114-
dinrg-draft-report-of-dinrg-workshop-on-centralization-in-the-
internet-01.pdf
[4] Design Expectations vs. Deployment Reality in Protocol
Development Workshop 2019, Internet Architecture Board
https://www.iab.org/activities/workshops/dedr-
workshop/position-papers/
[5] Consolidation In the Internet Economy, Internet Society, 2019.
https://future.internetsociety.org/2019/consolidation-in-the-
internet-economy
[6] IBID page 5.
[7] Journal of Cyber Policy, Volume 5, Issue 1 (2020) Special
Issue: Consolidation of the Internet
(https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rcyb20/5/1)
[8] An Empirical View on Consolidation of the Web, Trinh Viet
Doan, Roland van Rijswijk-Deij, Oliver Hohlfeld, and Vaibhav
Bajpai. 2022. ACM Trans. Internet Technol. 22, 3, Article 70
(February 2022),
https://vaibhavbajpai.com/documents/papers/proceedings/web-
consolidation-toit-2022.pdf
[9] IBID page 70:3
[10] RFC 8890, The Internet is for End Users. Nottingham, Mark.
August 2020. https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8890
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 9]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
10. Acknowledgments
Many thanks to all who discussed this with us in DINRG in 2021 and
2022.
This document was prepared using 2-Word-v2.0.template.dot.
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 10]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
Authors' Addresses
Mark McFadden
Internet policy advisors ltd
Chepstow, Wales, UK
Email: mark@internetpolicyadvisors.com
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 11]
Independent Submission M. McFadden
Internet Draft Internet policy advisors, ltd
October 24, 2022
Intended status: Informational
Expires: April 23, 2023
A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation
draft-mcfadden-consolidation-taxonomy-00.txt
Status of this Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that
other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-
Drafts.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six
months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents
at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as
reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at
http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt
The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at
http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html
This Internet-Draft will expire on April 23, 2023.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2022 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
(http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
publication of this document. Please review these documents
carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with
respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this
document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in
Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without
warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License.
McFadden Expires April 23, 2021 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
Abstract
This document contributes to the ongoing discussion surrounding
Internet consolidation. At recent IETF meetings discussions about
Internet consolidation revealed that different perspectives gave
completely different views of what consolidation means. While we use
the term consolidation to refer to the process of increasing control
over Internet infrastructure and services by a small set of
organizations, it is clear that that control is expressed through
economic, network traffic and protocol concerns. As a contribution
to the discussion surrounding consolidation, this document attempts
to provide a taxonomy of Internet consolidation with the goal of
adding clarity to a complex discussion.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction - Why a Taxonomy?.................................2
2. Background to Consolidation Issues.............................3
3. Economic Consolidation.........................................4
3.1. Economic Revenue Consolidation............................4
3.2. Economic Flow Consolidation...............................5
4. Traffic and Infrastructure Consolidation.......................5
5. Architectural Consolidation....................................6
5.1. The Rise of Intermediaries................................6
5.2. Vertical Architectural Consolidation......................7
5.3. Standards Development.....................................7
6. Service and Application Consolidation..........................8
7. Security Considerations........................................8
8. IANA Considerations............................................8
9. References.....................................................9
9.1. Informative References....................................9
10. Acknowledgments..............................................10
1. Introduction - Why a Taxonomy?
Internet consolidation has been under discussion for the last
several years. The 2019 Internet Society's "Global Internet Report:
Consolidation and the Internet Economy" highlighted issues on this
topic and kicked started a series of discussions and publications
around consolidation. The DINRG Workshop on Centralization took
place in June of 2021 and was reported on at IETF 114. Furthermore,
a draft for the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) discussed issues
of economic and technical consolidation. [1] Despite community
interest, the draft expired without further work or publication.
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 2]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
Several other contributions have focused on responses to
consolidation. However, the report from the DINRG Workshop makes
clear that there are different "categories of centralization." This
draft does not attempt to propose responses to centralization,
instead it attempts to build upon the Workshop's summary of
"categories of centralization" with a goal of supporting future work
and discussion.
2. Background to Consolidation Issues
Internet consolidation is "the process of increasing control over
internet infrastructure and services by a small set of
organizations." [2] Economy of scale is the driving force behind
consolidation because markets naturally consolidate when economies
of scale come into play.
The DINRG Workshop Report notes that:
"- the economy of scale enables one to generate the same service
outcome with far lower production costs, and consume fewer resources
for each instance of the service transaction.
- a large user pool produces big data which helps improve service
customization for each user, letting bigger companies gain an edge
over smaller competitors.
- centralized application developments reduce the number of
platforms, hence substantially reduce the cost in development and
maintenance, and circumvent interoperability issues. Consolidated
development and operational efforts also help mitigate technical
expertise shortages.
- most of all, monopoly players can dictate to the market the terms
of the service and the service price bought to the market, which
causes longer term stagnation of the market and increased
inefficiency within the market, which acts as a drag on further
innovation."
The current consolidation and centralization of control and
operation of Internet infrastructure and services was not an
original design goal. In fact, RFC1958 says:
"This allows for uniform and relatively seamless operations in a
competitive, multi-vendor, multi-provider public network."
and later,
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 3]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
"Heterogeneity is inevitable and must be supported by design."[3]
Much of the discussion surrounding consolidation focuses on Internet
services, applications and data.[4] However, contributions to the
discussion of consolidation have also addressed economic, traffic
and architectural consolidation. In recognition of this, a taxonomy
with four main categories is proposed:
- Economic Consolidation
- Traffic and Infrastructure Consolidation
- Architectural Consolidation
- Service and Application Consolidation
3. Economic Consolidation
The Internet Society Report on Internet Consolidation suggests that
the Internet's economy is defined as the economic activities that
either support the Internet or are fundamentally dependent on the
Internet's existence.
As a result, economic consolidation on the Internet refers to the
effects of market consolidation on competition and the economic
power of a small set of companies that dominate economic activity in
the Internet. There are two aspects to economic consolidation on the
Internet.
Economic consolidation means that a small number of companies
dominate the marketplace and hence, the revenues gathered from the
use of the Internet.
Economic consolidation also means that a small number of companies
control the flow of capital among enterprises that provide services
on the Internet.
3.1. Economic Revenue Consolidation
One of the two aspects of economic consolidation is the generation
of revenue by a small number of enterprises. As an example, Amazon
accounts for more than 45% of all online retail spending in the
United States. Alibaba is estimated to have 60% or the electronic
commerce market in China. Meta - including Facebook, Messenger,
WhatsApp and Instagram - dominates social media and messaging
holding four of the world's top six social media platforms. [6]
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 4]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
In each of these cases, a very small number of companies operate
extremely popular services, concentrating revenue generation into
those companies. In fact, the popularity of these services is so
great that value is created by adding other, complementary services
onto the base they provide. The dominant services thus control the
foundation upon which other revenue streams are built. [7]
3.2. Economic Flow Consolidation
In addition to revenue generation, the very large application layer
companies (Alphabet, Amazon, Tencent, Meta and Alibaba) control how
money and capital moves through enterprises providing services on
the Internet.
We have seen that embedded intermediaries that have substantial
power can implement platforms that provide services to downstream
consumers as well as upstream sources of content and applications.
As the controlling intermediary for those services and applications,
these large companies are also able to dictate how economic flows
move between consumers and providers of applications and services.
Regulators and policy makers often are concerned about the enormous
market power that these huge intermediaries have, but refrain from
imposing controls or sanctions on the grounds that consumers get
significant benefits when platform operators use upstream revenues
to subsidize downstream services.
4. Traffic and Infrastructure Consolidation
A significant majority of the Internet's traffic is delivered from
very large content services including Google, Amazon and Facebook.
These companies naturally attempt to provide the best possible
service for their customers - including perceived speed of content
delivery - these content services seek to establish connections
directly with the companies providing access to the network. The
result is a "flattening" of the Internet's traditional topology.
In fact, a recent study shows that these large services can reach
more than 76% of the Internet without having to traverse traditional
Tier 1 and Tier 2 ISPs. Besides bringing benefits of low latency and
higher security to their uses, these large-scale networks are also
able to implement improvements and innovations in protocol design by
having far greater control over the elements of the infrastructure
being used to deliver services.
An empirical view of this consolidation in February of 2022 [8]
shows that the number of webpages that are hosted on these networks
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 5]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
has increased from 2015 to 2020 at a rate exceeding 80%. In looking
at data sources including TLD datasets and Alexa Top 1M datasets
only a small number of content delivery networks host the vast
majority of landing pages.
Centralization of this sort makes traffic filtering easier since
forcing a content network to block specific content (or worse,
blocking the content network entirely) would make a large amount of
the content unavailable. As these networks begin to migrate other
services to HTTP (for instance, DNS over HTTP), more than the web is
affected by the impacts of filtering by centralized content
services. In fact, blocking a content network entirely would block
all the content of the network, not just the content that was the
target of the filtering.
This happens at all layers. As an example at the application layer,
in 2021 Google and Apple were forced to remove applications created
by the Russian political opposition from their stores. The ability
of a government to influence the content network means that
centralization can lead to a reduction in the diversity of
information or services on the Internet.
As the content networks grow in scale, the networks themselves grow
to support the required network capacity. This sets up a feedback
look that drives market concentration toward the infrastructure
provided by the content networks. As these networks grow larger, it
becomes difficult for smaller networks and infrastructure providers
to compete with the economies of scale from which the large networks
benefit.
5. Architectural Consolidation
A third category of consolidation is the evolution of the Internet's
architecture to meet contemporary use cases and requirements. Early
descriptions of the Internet's architecture described heterogeneous
endpoints connected by neutral transports. The end-to-end principle
suggested that the transport of data between endpoints was provided
without much intervention. [10]
Two developments have led to architectural consolidation: the
emergence of intermediary services and the movement of transport
related code to the application layer.
5.1. The Rise of Intermediaries
In the first case, technologies like CDNs are built into the network
for the efficient delivery of content and services. The consumer is
McFadden Expires April 24, 2023 [Page 6]
Internet-Draft A Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation Oct 2022
largely unaware that the service or application is being hosted by
an organization other than they one they think they contacted.
Instead, content delivery is pushed as close to the consumer as
possible to ensure that the end-user experience is as optimal as
possible.
The result is a series of security, economic and policy concerns
associated with the small number of very large providers of these
intermediary services. However, in this section we only want to
consider the architectural issues specific to the use of
intermediaries.
5.2. Vertical Architectural Consolidation
The second case is vertical architectural consolidation. This is
where the companies that control the applications attempt to control
all aspects of the communication. For instance, the provider of the
browser may be the organization that the browser connects to. The
advantage of this kind of architectural consolidation is that it
allows the largest players to introduce technological innovation
more quickly than if multiple layers of the stack required
innovation in parallel.
With tools like DNS over HTTPS, we see applications taking control
of the infrastructure of transport in addition to providing an
application or service. Applications essentially provide their own
ecosystem (from centralized control of DNS services all the way to
the end-user experience).
5.3. Standards Development
Others have rightly observed that, in the current environment,
development of protocols and standards for the Internet is largely
confined to a small number of participants from a small number of
organizations. One trend is that the giant enterprises on the
Internet also dominate the development of protocols.
Having a small number of organizations controlling the
infrastructure of the Internet also means that innovative
technologies can be implemented quickly and at large-scale. In 2022,
a study in the ACM Transactions on Internet Technology found that
Google accounting for 60% of all TLS 1.3 secured resources. Some
other, large CDNs use TLS 1.3 almost exclusively. QUIC is also an
example of a new technology that profits from consolidation. Large
scale intermediaries can facilitate the deployment and adoption of
new standards because the decision for the adoption is propagated
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across the infrastructure instead of through user adoption or
feature updates.
6. Service and Application Consolidation
Services and applications are those tools that users see when they
interact with the Internet. They take advantage of the
infrastructure (and, access) parts of the Internet's ecosystem.
According to the Internet Society's report on consolidation, "a
small number of companies operating some of the Internet's most
popular services dominate this market. Many of these companies act
as multi-sided markets or platforms, meaning they offer a base upon
which other applications, processes or technologies can be
developed."
By itself, Google holds 90% of the global search market, the number
one mobile operating system (Android), the top-user-generated video
platform and has more than 1.5 billion active users of its Gmail
email service. Google also has a map service, a public DNS resolver
service, a cloud service and a document store.
While twenty years ago, an application would simply rely on the
underlying operating system to provide its communications and
transport services, now applications and services do this for
themselves. This is a case of the intermediary or platform providing
the application integrating all the necessary components for
providing a service on the Internet.
7. Security Considerations
While this document does not describe a specific protocol, it does
discuss the evolving architecture of the Internet. Changes to the
Internet's architecture have direct and indirect implications for
the Internet's threat model. In another draft [20]REFERENCE, we
discuss how the evolution of the Internet has changed the threat
model. Specifically, the changes to the end-to-end model (see
section 4.2 above) have inserted new interfaces which must be
reflected in security considerations for new protocols.
8. IANA Considerations
This memo contains no instructions or requests for IANA. Conclusions
This document seeks to rekindle and restart the discussion on
consolidation. As argued above, Internet consolidation is happening
at different places and different layers of the Internet. Though
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there has been interest in the Internet consolidation in the past,
now is the time to start the discussions again.
9. References
9.1. Informative References
[1] Considerations on Internet Consolidation and the Internet
Architecture [draft-arkko-iab-internet-consolidation-02].
[2] IBID
[3] Draft Report of DINRG Workshop on Centralization in the
Internet, June 3, 2021, Huitema, Huston, Kutscher, Zhang,
https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/114/materials/slides-114-
dinrg-draft-report-of-dinrg-workshop-on-centralization-in-the-
internet-01.pdf
[4] Design Expectations vs. Deployment Reality in Protocol
Development Workshop 2019, Internet Architecture Board
https://www.iab.org/activities/workshops/dedr-
workshop/position-papers/
[5] Consolidation In the Internet Economy, Internet Society, 2019.
https://future.internetsociety.org/2019/consolidation-in-the-
internet-economy
[6] IBID page 5.
[7] Journal of Cyber Policy, Volume 5, Issue 1 (2020) Special
Issue: Consolidation of the Internet
(https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rcyb20/5/1)
[8] An Empirical View on Consolidation of the Web, Trinh Viet
Doan, Roland van Rijswijk-Deij, Oliver Hohlfeld, and Vaibhav
Bajpai. 2022. ACM Trans. Internet Technol. 22, 3, Article 70
(February 2022),
https://vaibhavbajpai.com/documents/papers/proceedings/web-
consolidation-toit-2022.pdf
[9] IBID page 70:3
[10] RFC 8890, The Internet is for End Users. Nottingham, Mark.
August 2020. https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8890
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10. Acknowledgments
Many thanks to all who discussed this with us in DINRG in 2021 and
2022.
This document was prepared using 2-Word-v2.0.template.dot.
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Authors' Addresses
Mark McFadden
Internet policy advisors ltd
Chepstow, Wales, UK
Email: mark@internetpolicyadvisors.com
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