There is a phenomenal concentration of power in the hands of a few: Internet has seen growing over the top players during the last twenty years.

But I think that when it comes to Public bodies, a public interest service, like hosting of websites, should be protected and not open to blackmail by anybody.

What I wanted to find is where do italian public administration websites actually live (refer to my previous article for a comparison) and if there is a dangerous scenario for that important public service.

Our research considered a wide (and comprehensive) number of Italian public administration websites: 17,679 (kudos to Tonino Andrenacci who gave me reliable raw data). There are more than 8,000 town halls, more than 8,000 schools, more than 1,000 national and regional bodies.

This is how we did it, domain by domain:

• query for IN A record (and IN AAAA);
• query for its originating AS number;
• query for whois data of involved ASs;
• publish top scoring ASs.

This is the list of 24 ASs (ie 5.59% out of 429 ASs) that are hosting in IPv4 more than 100 domains each (belonging to PAs):

So, 24 different Autonomous Systems are serving 13,870 domain names (78.45%), out of 17,679.

Should be noted that just 3 of them, owned by 2 renowned corporations Aruba (AS31034) and Telecom Italia (AS20746 and AS3269), are holding 8,208 domain names that is 46.43%.

AS31034 alone is serving around 38.82% of all Italian public administration domain names.

Now, what about IPv6 speaking websites?

Well, just 195 (1.1%) domain names out of 17,679 have an IPv6 address in place as well, 136 of them (69.74%) are served by AS12637, Seeweb.

Read also my previous (2014) article about: IPv6 in the Internet resources of italian Public Administration at a glance.

Who leads Italian Public Administration websites around by the nose? by Antonio Prado is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International