Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors
6 hours ago
- #European Companies
- #Infrastructure Vendors
- #DNS Analysis
- The study analyzed DNS A/AAAA records for 19,450 European company websites to determine their internet-facing infrastructure vendors.
- US-headquartered vendors dominate in the UK (67.5%) and the Netherlands (53.6%), and hold a plurality in Italy, Spain, and France (44-49%).
- Cloudflare is the largest infrastructure vendor in all seven European countries studied, surpassing other US vendors, European hosting companies, and domestic ISPs.
- Germany and Poland are exceptions, with dense domestic hosting industries like Hetzner and Home.pl reducing US vendor dominance.
- The research focuses on vendor attribution, not physical data-center location, distinguishing between CDN front-end providers and origin hosting.
- The findings have implications for EU policy, procurement, and discussions on sovereignty, vendor concentration, and supply chain risks.
- Limitations include not measuring origin hosting behind CDNs, EU sub-processor arrangements, or specific product configurations.
- The methodology uses AS operator names from DNS resolutions and includes data from a specific snapshot window, with deduplication per entity.