Few Throats to Choke: On the Current Structure of the Internet

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the centralization of Internet routing, revealing that key Autonomous Systems controlled by censorious nations like China, Russia, and India dominate traffic, impacting global users and highlighting vulnerabilities in Internet resilience.

Contribution

It identifies major routing hubs controlled by authoritarian regimes and discusses their influence on global Internet traffic and censorship effects.

Findings

Routing is highly centralized around few Autonomous Systems.

Many major ASes are under censorious country jurisdictions.

Censorship in China and India affects users worldwide.

Abstract

The original design of the Internet was a resilient, distributed system, that maybe able to route around (and therefore recover from) massive disruption --- up to and including nuclear war. However, network routing effects and business decisions cause traffic to often be routed through a relatively small set of Autonomous Systems (ASes). This is not merely an academic issue; it has practical implications --- some of these frequently appearing ASes are hosted in censorious nations. Other than censoring their own citizens' network access, such ASes may inadvertently filter traffic for other foreign customer ASes. In this paper, we examine the extent of routing centralization in the Internet; identify the major players who control the "Internet backbone"; and point out how many of these are, in fact, under the jurisdiction of censorious countries (specifically, Russia, China, and India). Further, we show that China and India are not only the two largest nations by number of Internet users, but that many users in free and democratic countries are affected by collateral damage caused due to censorship by such countries.