Analyzing the Challenge of Digital Sovereignty
AquaLab researchers examine the hosting strategies of government digital services worldwide
Taking advantage of flexible resource allocation, service scalability, and relatively low overhead costs, government agencies use third-party Internet providers to host critical, high-traffic digital platforms.
During the last 30 days, 1.67 billion users visited US federal government websites to access information and essential functions — from the US Postal Service to the National Weather Service to the Social Security Administration. In the Asia-Pacific region, more than 75 percent of citizens use information technology as their primary means of accessing government services.
The decade-long trend toward global Internet consolidation and centralization has led to emerging concerns about digital sovereignty, security, and international dependencies.
In the first comprehensive study of E-government hosting models, Northwestern Engineering’s Fabián E. Bustamante and Rashna Kumar examined the evolving landscape of server infrastructures in the government sector, and the choices governments make between leveraging third-party solutions and maintaining control over users' access to their services and information via on-premises infrastructure.
“Digital government is integral to modern life,” said Kumar, a PhD candidate in computer science at the McCormick School of Engineering and the paper’s first author. “Policymakers need to carefully balance efficiency and expertise with control and independence to ensure that service solutions and digital assets are equitable, secure, and resilient.”
Kumar presented the paper at the Association for Computing Machinery Internet Measurement Conference 2024, held in November in Madrid.
The project team — including computer science postdoctoral scholar Esteban Carisimo and collaborators at the Universidad de San Andrés, Universidad de Buenos Aires, and Lahore University of Management Sciences — built a dataset on hosting strategies employed by 61 governments across every continent, representing 82 percent of the world’s Internet population.
“This dataset enabled us to better understand both how governments attempt to centralize and shore up their digital infrastructure and what international dependencies are shaped by these strategies,” said Bustamante, professor of computer science at Northwestern Engineering and director of AquaLab, a research group that investigates large-scale networks and distributed systems.
Kumar explained that the team’s analysis of more than one million unique web resources underscored the widespread reliance on third-party infrastructure, cross-border dependencies, and infrastructure centralization.
National governments and state-owned enterprises predominantly rely on third-party infrastructure for data delivery, including 62 percent of hosted URLs and 53 percent of bytes. The global hosting market is highly centralized. One hosting company, Cloudflare, for instance, provides services for 49 governments worldwide.
And, while 87 percent of government URLs route through domestic servers, regional differences are stark. Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, serves nearly half of its URLs from international servers, compared to less than 2 percent in North America. In the Latin America region, Mexico hosts 79 percent of its government URLs in the US, while Costa Rica relies on US-based servers for half of its government services.
The team also determined that governments leveraging third-party providers tend to diversify across multiple networks, whereas governments that use on-premises infrastructure often use a single network for most of their content.
“Our research offers policymakers and technologists a data-driven framework to make informed decisions about digital sovereignty,” Kumar said.