Uncovering the Big Players of the Web

In this paper we aim at observing how today the Internet large organizations deliver web content to end users. Using one-week long data sets collected at three vantage points aggregating more than 30,000 Internet customers, we characterize the offered services precisely quantifying and comparing the performance of different players. Results show that today 65% of the web traffic is handled by the top 10 organizations. We observe that, while all of them serve the same type of content, different server architectures have been adopted considering load balancing schemes, servers number and location: some organizations handle thousands of servers with the closest being few milliseconds far away from the end user, while others manage few data centers. Despite this, the performance of bulk transfer rate offered to end users are typically good, but impairment can arise when content is not readily available at the server and has to be retrieved from the CDN back-end.