As a collection of inter-twined markets, aspects of the Internet have been prone to excessive market distortions where one, or a small clique, of providers in market sector become completely dominant to the extent that there is no effective competition and no possibility of admitting additional market entrants. This form of market dominance is often termed "centrality". How centralised is the DNS?
Much has been said about the use of the DNS as a means of tracking and controlling the online behaviour of users. The response has been to hide the DNS behind encrypted transport.
In October 2026 the Key-Signing Key of the DNS Root Zone will rolled to a new value. Can we measure how well DNS Resolvers that perform DNSSEC validation are prepared for this change in the trusted root key?
NZNOG 2026 was held in Christchurch in March 2026. The NZ national community has a long track record of innovation, both in technology and in the underlying investment models for its network infrastructure. Here's a summary of some of the sessions that I found to be of interest.
It's fading from our collective memory, but almost thirty years ago the global IT industry was gripped by Y2K fever. Another version of the counter rollover problem is coming back in 2036, 2038 and 2040. Hopefully we will avoid a large amount of hysteria this time around!
For some time, I have been looking after a routing analysis report called the "". Here I'd like to explain the reasons for this report, and what is in the report and share some thoughts as to its usefulness today to the Internet routing community.
Today's digital world relies on a consistent view of the time. We achieve this with the Network Time Protocol (NTP). Given the extent of our reliance on an accurate time base it is surprusing that the NTP protocol has no security mechanisms to protect the integrity of time dissemination. Lets look at time, NTP and the recent efforts to add authenticity and temper detection to this protocol.
It's quite surprising what you can do in the DNS when you break out of the conventional contsraints and adopt a more flexible view of the DNS query/response model.
The whois query tool is useful to identify which organisation holds an IP Address Prefix or an Autonomous System Number, but not so useful in performing the reverse query, listing all IP Addresses and Autonomous System Numbers held by an organisation. Here is a resource that can help with such queries.
It's time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. Let’s see what has changed in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet and look at how IP address allocation information can inform us of the changing nature of the network itself.
The first part of this annual report on BGP for the year 2024 looked at the size of the routing table and some projections of table growth for both IPv4 and IPv6. However, the scalability of BGP as the Internet’s routing protocol is not just dependant on the number of prefixes carried in the routing table. BGP protocol behaviour in the form of dynamic routing updates are also part of this story. This second part of this report looks at the profile of BGP updates across 2023 to assess whether the stability of the routing system, as measured by the level of BGP update activity, is changing.
At the start of each year, it’s been my practice to report on the behaviour of the Internet’s inter-domain routing system over the previous 12 months, looking in some detail at some metrics from the routing system that can show the essential shape and behaviour of the underlying interconnection fabric of the Internet.
The activity of locating devices and users, termed "Geolocation" was the topic of a workshop, hosted by the Internet Architecture Board in early December 2025, and here I'd like to relate my impressions of the discussions that took place in this workshop.
NANOG held its 95th meeting in Arlington, Texas in October of 2025. Here's my take on a few presentations that caught my attention through this three-day meeting.
Civil unrest can often cloud measurement data. Some measurement systems, including the one we use at APNIC Labs, make relatively sweeping assumptions about the stability of both end user behaviour and network service behaviours, and assume that the changes that occur from day-to-day are minor. During times of civil unrest those assumptions are pretty dubious, and this applies to our measurements of ISP market share in Yeman and Myanmar.
At APNIC Labs we publish a number of measurements of the deployment of various technologies that are being adopted on the Internet. Here I will look at how we measure the adoption of IPv6.
Potaroo blog