Observed consolidation in Internet infrastructure is ambiguous: the same concentration level can reflect unavoidable ecosystem constraints or deliberate deployment choices, and these regimes produce measurably different consequences. This dissertation introduces a comparative framework that distinguishes structural consolidation from strategic consolidation by interpreting government web infrastructure relative to the surrounding commercial ecosystem in each country. Across 61 countries and over a million URLs, it measures provider concentration in content hosting, authoritative DNS, and certificate authorities, and shows that similar concentration levels arise for fundamentally different reasons.
The framework enables a second contribution: interpreting what consolidation means for users. The dissertation shows that practical redundancy is limited regardless of consolidation type. Strategic centralization does not buy better fallback than structurally constrained ecosystems provide. It shows that structural consolidation produces uniform foreign exposure while strategic consolidation produces high variance, and that path-level dependencies introduce jurisdictional exposure that hosting level analysis alone cannot detect. It shows that consolidation shapes performance both through infrastructure placement and through opaque content delivery steering, and introduces a methodology to infer CDN replica selection strategies at a global scale.
Taken together, this work argues that concentration metrics alone underspecify the phenomenon they claim to measure. By providing a comparative baseline that separates how concentrated from why concentrated, it offers a foundation for more rigorous interpretation of Internet consolidation across sectors and countries.