Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media 1(2021), 1–34 10.51685/jqd.2021.011 Evidence of Decreasing Internet Entropy: The Lack of Redundancy in DNS Resolution by Major Websites and Services SAMANTHA BATES Harvard Law School, United States of America JOHN BOWERS Yale Law School, United States of America SHANE GREENSTEIN Harvard Business School, United States of America JORDI WEINSTOCK Harvard Law School, United States of America YUNHAN XU Harvard College, United States of America JONATHAN ZITTRAIN Harvard Law School & Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, United States of America The Internet, and the Web built on top of it, were intended to support an “entropic” physical and logical network map (Zittrain, 2013). That is, they have been designed to allow servers to be spread anywhere in the world in an ad hoc and evolving fashion, rather than a centralized one. Arbitrary distance among, and number of, servers causes no particular architectural problems, and indeed ensures that problems experienced by one data source remain unlinked to others. A Web page can be assembled from any number of upstream sources, through the use of various URLs, each pointing to a different location. To a user, the page looks unified. Over time, however, Greenstein:
[email protected] Date submitted: 2020-12-25 Copyright © 2021 (Samantha Bates, John Bowers, Shane Greenstein, Jordi Weinstock, Yunhan Xu, Jonathan Zittrain). Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License. Available at: http://journalqd.org Bates et al. Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media 1(2021) 2 there are signs that the hosting and finding of Internet services has become more centralized.