About This Project

You type a URL into your browser and a page appears. It feels simple, open, borderless. But behind that effortless experience lies an enormously concentrated infrastructure controlled by a shrinking number of corporations. The cables under the ocean, the data centers humming in the desert, the DNS resolvers that translate names into addresses, the cloud platforms that host the applications, the search engines that decide what you find — all of it funnels through a remarkably small set of hands.

Who Owns the Internet? is a data-driven investigation that maps this concentration across every layer of the internet stack. From the physical submarine cables on the ocean floor to the application layer on your screen, we trace ownership, quantify market share, and visualize the corporate relationships that define who really controls the digital world.

This project does not exist to vilify any single company. These are, in many cases, companies that built extraordinary technology. But concentration is a structural risk — to competition, to resilience, to civil liberties, and to the open character of the internet itself. When three cloud providers host the majority of the web, when one search engine controls over 90% of queries, when five companies own most of the newest submarine cables, the public deserves to see that clearly.

Our goal is to make the invisible visible. Informed societies make better decisions about regulation, competition policy, and digital rights when they can see the full picture. This is that picture.