Who runs the internet

Not a leaderboard. Concentration. That a handful of companies answer, route, front and vouch for most of the web is a systemic-risk fact, and it is only a fact if you say what you measured it against. So every lane below carries its own denominator, because we know the DNS provider for far more domains than we know the certificate issuer, and pretending otherwise would flatter the numbers.

A bounded slice, and it is not a random one. These lanes are recomputed from a capped walk of the catalog taken in alphabetical order: up to 300,000 domains of ~809,000. So every denominator below is what that walk could read, never the limit of what we hold, and because the walk is a prefix rather than a sample the shares are a bounded reading and not a survey of the internet. For the same question answered over the whole scanned corpus, see the state of the internet.

DNS

Who answers for the internet?

One provider covers half of it. The top 3 hold 98.1% of the 143,001 domains in this walk that carry a reading for it.

Cloudflare 115,26680.6%
AWS Route 53 20,94714.6%
Google Cloud DNS 4,0642.8%
Azure DNS 2,7641.9%
Fly.io DNS 10.0%

Email

Who handles its mail? (a domain often uses several)

2 providers cover half of it. The top 3 hold 81.8% of the 99,936 domains in this walk that carry a reading for it.

Google Workspace 42,86642.9%
Microsoft 365 35,71135.7%
Google (SPF sender) 32,02632.0%
Amazon SES 8,4078.4%
SendGrid 7,2027.2%
Mailgun 6,5366.5%
Mailchimp 6,3166.3%
HubSpot 5,1965.2%
Mandrill (Mailchimp) 5,0965.1%
Zendesk 4,7954.8%
Salesforce 4,0284.0%
Proofpoint 3,3243.3%
Zoho Mail 3,2283.2%
Mimecast 2,7032.7%
Brevo (Sendinblue) 2,4372.4%

CDN

Who sits in front of it?

One provider covers half of it. The top 3 hold 100.0% of the 116,524 domains in this walk that carry a reading for it.

Cloudflare (proxied) 116,45699.9%
AWS CloudFront 630.1%
Fastly 80.0%

Certificate authorities

Who vouches for its identity?

2 providers cover half of it. The top 3 hold 84.3% of the 248,754 domains in this walk that carry a reading for it.

Let's Encrypt 117,80247.4%
GlobalSign 91,79936.9%
Google Trust Services 88,13635.4%
Starfield Technologies 11,2214.5%
Sectigo 10,7364.3%
Amazon 10,1884.1%
The USERTRUST Network 8,6683.5%
DigiCert 8,6633.5%
GoDaddy.com 5,5502.2%
ZeroSSL GmbH 1,3260.5%
Unizeto Technologies S.A. 1,0370.4%
Asseco Data Systems S.A. 7270.3%
GoDaddy 5860.2%
Actalis S.p.A. 5790.2%
Actalis S.p.A./03358520967 5790.2%

Hosting networks

Whose machines is it actually on?

3 providers cover half of it. The top 3 hold 51.0% of the 227,541 domains in this walk that carry a reading for it.

Cloudflare 86,83538.2%
Amazon 23,78610.5%
Google 5,4522.4%
Hetzner 5,0852.2%
OVH 4,6932.1%
Fastly 3,7041.6%
AS-HOSTINGER - Hostinger International Limited 3,5961.6%
Microsoft 3,2071.4%
DigitalOcean 3,0141.3%
Akamai 2,6631.2%
IONOS-AS - IONOS SE 2,1641.0%
Leaseweb 2,0610.9%
Alibaba 1,9490.9%
GoDaddy 1,8580.8%
Namecheap 1,7510.8%

How these shares are counted. A domain counts once per lane, and providers are collapsed to the company rather than the label ("Cloudflare (proxied)" and "Cloudflare" are the same company wearing two hats). A domain whose lane we could not observe is left out of that lane entirely rather than counted as a zero, because not knowing is not the same as nobody. Every figure comes from a signed observation you can re-verify.

The other half of this question. This page answers how much of the internet a provider holds. For which domains are newly observed on a provider and which ones left, see provider watch.

CONTINUOUS INTERNET TELEMETRY24H DRIFT28,790 material changesacross 22,188 domains · 24h to ~2h ago · -1,047 vs yesterdayROTATION61 domains moved DNS from kirklanddc.com to koaladns.com, 54 moved backa rotation loop, not a migration · 24hCERT DRIFT1 domains switched issuing CA24hREGISTRAR DRIFT1 changed registrar24hNOW599 curated domains not reachablelast probe, steadySITE ERRORS17,403 sites serving errorslast probe · 5xx / 404 / TLSBOT DEFENSEbot defense observed on 79,509 sites429 rate-limit / 403 bot-block, a posture signal