Mapping Local Internet Control

The Internet is a battleground of control by national governments, among other actors. That contested control takes the form not only of Internet filtering but also of activities that directly impact cyber security, including surveillance and malware hosting. To better understand that battleground, it is important to understand how each nation structures the Internet within its borders. One helpful way to understand the structure of national Internets is by mapping autonomous system relationships within each country. Those autonomous systems are the ISPs and other large organizations that are responsible for routing traffic both within the larger Internet and within their own networks and as such act as points of technical and political control of the Internet. This paper describes a method for mapping national networks of autonomous systems, for identifying a small set of autonomous systems that act as points of control for each national network, and for measuring the complexity of the networks of autonomous systems within each country. Using these methods, we make several specific findings about the structure of national autonomous system networks. Our primary finding is that across all countries, only a few autonomous systems act as points of control. But there are significant differences between autonomous system networks among both countries and regions. China and other Eastern Asian countries are very centralized and very simple–with tens of millions of users per point of control and with Internet users concentrated in only a few of the biggest autonomous systems. Russia and other Easter European countries are much less centralized and much more complex– with only hundreds of thousands of Internet users per point of control and with Internet users scattered through many autonomous systems connected to each other through a much more complex web of relationships. These findings speak both to how the countries exert control over their networks and to how national philosophies of political control have shaped the technical details of their local portions of the Internet. We propose this map as a fertile field for future work that combines computer and social science to understand how countries attempt to exert control over their portions of the Internet. Keywords-internet; autonomous systems; politics