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Internet Atlas

What We Do

Who controls the internet?

The Internet Atlas project at the U.C. Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity uses measurements from various layers of the internet’s stack to understand how power works on the internet—who controls what, and for whom that control matters.

Internet Atlas gif — Curious about what countries are blocking websites and at what volume? When countries block websites, they usually block websites based in the United States. See an interactive visualization here. Click on a country to see whose websites it blocks (outgoing) and who blocks its websites (incoming). View all of our source code here

The Internet is composed of a “stack” of technologies, each built on top of one another. By taking measurements at each layer, we build a holistic picture of power, control, fragmentation, and centrality on the Internet.
(Example proxies above from ***2019***)

We read these measurements through a set of key questions:

Could a political crisis, like a world war, result in catastrophic pan-internet outages? For example: in a war in East Asia, what would happen to Internet access in Taiwan? In the United States?
What is the role of popular will in deciding how the internet works? For example: Whose opinions get to matter (i.e., result in binding decisions), and whose don’t? How do corporations and states shape the technical infrastructure of the internet — and vice versa?
What role could popular will play in deciding how the internet works? For example: What practical pathways exist for governments and social movements to contest risky, dysfunctional, or anticompetivie internet design decisions?

Papers

Inside the Internet
Duke Law Journal (2023)

Comments of Nick Merrill and Tejas N. Narechania, Business Practices of Cloud Computing Providers, No. FTC-2023-0028

Web site blocking as a proxy of policy alignment First Monday (2021)

Tools

Internet Society’s Pulse Dashboard – Internet Concentration

The Internet relies on a decentralized architecture where control of core Internet services is distributed across the ‘network of networks‘. This ensures a more resilient network and avoids single points of failure or control.

In this focus area, we present data on the distribution of the market shares of core web technologies and infrastructure to see how services are concentrated among a few actors and countries or distributed among many, and track how this changes over time.