Who Owns The Internet?

What is this ball of colors? It is the North American Internet, or more specifically a map of just about every router on the North American backbone, (there are 134,855 of them for those who are counting). The colors represent who each router is registered to. Red is Verizon; blue AT&T; yellow Qwest; green is major backbone players like Level 3 and Sprint Nextel; black is the entire cable industry put together; and gray is everyone else, from small telecommunications companies to large international players who only have a small presence in the U.S. If you click on the map it will take you to much bigger version complete with labels that tell you the address of many of the routers.

I’ve been following the net neutrality debate for a while now. Real briefly, the telecommunications industry is lobbying for the right to manage the traffic that flows over their networks as they see fit. For more read the post linked above. Everyone is focusing on the last mile, which makes sense because that is the part of the network where there is the most congestion. But getting rid of net neutrality would also give the companies that own the fiber and routers at the core of the Internet the ability to manage data there.

When I heard that AT&T was going to buy Bell South, I wondered how much of the backbone this new company would own. With all the attention on the last mile were we overlooking a burgeoning monopoly at the core?

That’s where this map comes in. After about a day of searching around, someone told me about Bill Cheswick, the chief scientist at Lumeta a network intelligence company, who started toying around with a way to map the Internet when he worked at Bell Labs in the late 1990s.

This map is a collaboration between Ches and myself. I’m using the term collaboration in the loosest possible sense. Basically I asked Ches if he was able to tell me who owned the all the routers in North America, and he told me he could try. Over the next week and a half I added impossible request after impossible request (“can you color the routers that are registered to companies that have been bought by AT&T in the last decade blue?”) and he somehow figured out how to do it all.

In order to build this map Ches fired off 300,000 messages to various points on the Internet and mapped how they got there, recording the address of every router his packets passed. He also had to figure out a way to isolate routers in North America. The map is not perfect – he probably missed a few points and maybe double counted a couple more – but for all intents and purposes this is what the North American Internet looks like.

A few notes on reading the map. First, it is not geographic. Things on the right aren't on the East Coast and so forth. It looks the way it looks for readability purposes. The lines are actual connections between routers, but the length of the lines, again, do not correspond to geographic distance. Also, you’ll notice four thick green dots on left. Those routers belong to Bell Canada. Ches says that they probably represent rings around major Canadian cities that all connect at a central point. And in fact if you open the big map that has the labels you can see that some of the routers have different city names in their addresses.

So what can we conclude by looking at this? For starters, while AT&T and Verizon are clearly the two biggest owners at the core (they dwarf Qwest, the other remaining baby bell), they don’t own anywhere near enough for us to be worried about a monopoly. Also, the cable companies really own very little of the core, which isn’t much of a surprise since they are primarily focused on the last mile. Nonetheless, it is startling to see.

I encourage you to play around with the labeled map. You can see which company each router is registered to. Many still have old names like alter.net (now Verizon) and it is pretty interesting to see the extent to which the telecommunications market has consolidated over the last decade. (Also, if you have way to much time you can actually test each domain and see which company the address resolves to.) Sometimes the router address will include a geographic detail that tells you where it is based. All in all, there is a lot of cool information if you want to take a look.

Also, feel free to post questions about the map and what it reveals. I’ll be on vacation next week, but Ches has said he’ll stop by and he can probably answer them better than me anyway.

UPDATE: I want to respond to the first comment. Even though I mentioned the net neutrality debate above, I didn't really mean for this map to be a statement for one side or the other. The net neutrality debate has focused almost exclusively on the last mile. That's not what I am trying to focus on here (although I'm just finishing a feature story on that subject).

The map focuses on the backbone, i.e. where a packet goes after it passes through the last mile and into the core of the Internet. The question I was hoping it would answer was if one or two companies owned enough of the backbone as to give it or them too much control over the heart of the Internet. My feeling is that while AT&T and Verizon own an awful lot, they don't own enough to monopolize the core. For what it's worth, I don't consider that a ringing endorsement for those companies or their practices. 

The nice thing about having a map of course is that people can look at it and conclude whatever they want. And hopefully post their conclusions.

Now it's really off to vacation.