Esteban Carisimo

We present the first large-scale analysis of the adoption of third-party serving infrastructures in government digital services. Draw ing from data collected across 61 countries spanning every continent and region, capturing over 82% of the world’s Internet population, we examine the preferred hosting models for public-facing government sites and associated resources. Leveraging this dataset, we analyze government hosting strategies, cross-border dependencies, and the level of centralization in government web services. Among other findings, we show that governments predominantly rely on third-party infrastructure for data delivery, although this varies significantly, with even neighboring countries showing con- trasting patterns. Despite a preference for third-party hosting solutions, most government URLs in our study are served from domestic servers, although again with significant regional variation. Looking at overseas located servers, while the majority are found in North America and Western Europe, we note some interesting bilateral relationships (e.g., with 79% of Mexico’s government URLs being served from the US, and 26% of China’s government URLs from Japan). This research contributes to understanding the evolving landscape of serving infrastructures in the government sector, and the choices governments make between leveraging third-party solutions and maintaining control over users’ access to their services and information.

The Venezuelan crisis, unfolding over the past decade, has garnered international attention due to its impact on various sectors of civil society. While studies have extensively covered the crisis’s effects on public health, energy, and water management, this paper delves into a previously unexplored area - the impact on Venezuela’s Internet infrastructure. Amidst Venezuela’s multifaceted challenges, understanding the repercussions of this critical aspect of modern society becomes imperative for the country’s recovery. Leveraging measurements from various sources, we present a comprehensive view of the changes undergone by the Venezuelan network in the past decade. Our study reveals the significant impact of the crisis captured by different signals, including bandwidth stagnation, limited growth on network infrastructure growth, and high latency compared to the Latin American average. Beyond offering a new perspective on the Venezuelan crisis, our study can help inform attempts at devising strategies for its recovery.

In this paper, we provide the first comprehensive longitudinal analysis of government-ordered Internet shutdowns and spontaneous outages (i.e., disruptions not ordered by the government). We describe the available tools, data sources and methods to identify and analyze Internet shutdowns. We then merge manually curated datasets on known government-ordered shutdowns and large-scale Internet outages, further augmenting them with data on real-world events, macroeconomic and sociopolitical indicators, and network operator statistics. Our analysis confirms previous findings on the economic and political profiles of countries with government-ordered shutdowns. Extending this analysis, we find that countries with national-scale spontaneous outages often have profiles similar to countries with shutdowns, differing from countries that experience neither. However, we find that government-ordered shutdowns are many more times likely to occur on days of mobilization, coinciding with elections, protests, and coups. Our study also characterizes the temporal characteristics of Internet shutdowns and finds that they differ significantly in terms of duration, recurrence interval, and start times when compared to spontaneous outages