Cloud Provider Connectivity in the Flat Internet
Todd Arnold, Jia He, Weifan Jiang, Matt Calder, Ítalo F. S. Cunha, Vasileios Giotsas, Ethan Katz-Bassett · 2020
The Tier-1 ISPs have been considered the Internet's backbone since the dawn of the modern Internet 30 years ago, as they guarantee global reachability. However, their influence and importance are waning as Internet flattening decreases the demand for transit services and increases the importance of private interconnections. Conversely, major cloud providers -- Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft-- are gaining in importance as more services are hosted on their infrastructures. They ardently support Internet flattening and are rapidly expanding their global footprints, which enables them to bypass the Tier-1 ISPs and other large transit providers to reach many destinations.