FINDING · EVALUATION
By 2009, the top 150 autonomous systems carried approximately 50% of all Internet traffic globally, up from roughly 30% in 2007. Akamai alone claimed approximately 20% of all web traffic, and the proposed Level 3 / Global Crossing merger would have covered over half the world's IP addresses.
From 2011-roberts-mapping — Mapping Local Internet Control · §I · 2011 · Computer Communications Workshop
Implications
- Domain fronting and CDN-based transports (meek, AMP cache) directly exploit this AS-level concentration — a handful of large CDN ASes are too economically important for most censors to block outright, making them durable fronting targets.
- Track AS-level consolidation events (mergers, acquisitions); each reduction in the number of major transit ASes shrinks the viable set of fronting providers and should trigger re-evaluation of transport diversity.
Tags
Extracted by claude-sonnet-4-6 — review before relying.