About the Internet 

The Atlas Internet Observatory Report (2009) is based on aggregated statistics from more than 100 Internet service providers (ISPs) and content providers. The authors estimate that approximately 25 percent of all inter-domain Internet traffic contributed to their results. The major findings are:

• Consolidation of content contributors: 50 percent of Internet traffic is contributed by 150 networks
• Consolidation of applications: the Web browser is increasingly used as the application front end, applications increasingly use Web protocols to communicate
• Evolution of the Internet core: content is increasingly directly interconnected with consumer—or ‘eyeball’—networks. There is lots of economic innovation taking place in the commercial agreements between operators.

This last finding is described and discussed in more detail in the second study on which we invited comments from our contributors.