Abstract
ABSTRACT There is a noticeable trend towards the increased centralisation of Internet-based services. Though much focus is on the dominance of organisations such as Facebook, Google and Netflix, popular consumer-facing services, there has been considerably less discussion regarding the organisations providing the infrastructure that supports online services. This bears consideration, given that many online services rely on a range of platforms and services operated by third-parties. As such, this paper explores issues of consolidation as regards the systems supply chains that underpin and drive online services. Specifically, we note that while there are trends towards the increased centralisation and dominance in the provision of supporting technical infrastructure, the nature of these technical supply chains are relatively hidden. We explore the broader societal implications of this with regards to power and resilience, emphasising the lack of means, legal or technical, for uncovering the nature of the supply chains on which online services rely. Given society's ever-growing reliance on data-driven technology, we argue that more can be done to increase levels of transparency over the supply arrangements of technical infrastructure. This is a necessary precursor to determining what interventions, if any, may be required to deal with issues of consolidation in online infrastructure.
Highlights
There is a noticeable trend towards the increased centralisation of online services (Internet Society 2019)
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs): Similar to web hosting providers, looking at the domains being accessed does not itself provide a clear indication of CDNs being used
Regarding Content Management System (CMS), we identified the use of WordPress and Drupal by 171 sites (88 sites (8%) and 83 sites (7%) respectively) by analysing URLs and HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) headers
Summary
There is a noticeable trend towards the increased centralisation of online services (Internet Society 2019). These infrastructure services often include, for example, cloud services (storage, compute, [Anything]-as-a-Service), content distribution networks, software, processing and support platforms, analytics services, advertising brokers, and so forth.1 This means that applications are reliant on a data-driven supply chain of technologies and providers. This influence could be realised by way of the functionality provided, and through various conditions of use, e.g. contracts, terms of service, and so forth Consolidation at this level would raise questions of resilience, as a change, update, bug, failure or outage in a supporting technology or service has the potential to impact all applications that rely on them (see §3.1). We argue that greater attention should be paid to these service supply chains This aligns with the directions of current policy discussions concerning lower-level technical infrastructure (a prominent example being the use of Huawei technology in 5G networks (Swinford 2019)). We conclude with a discussion of potential ways forward in tackling the lack of visibility in infrastructure supply chains, to enable a better informed policy discourse
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