Cloudflare alone serves up to 83 percent of the top sites in ten Southeast Asian markets

The failure mode sits inside one company. Jason Hung's 2026 measurement puts Cloudflare at between 42.9 and 83.0 percent of the CDN market across the ten countries ^[8]. A provider holding 83.0 percent contributes 6,889 points to a Herfindahl-Hirschman score by itself, which is more than two and a half times the 2,500 mark the index treats as high concentration ^[2]. "An outage at Cloudflare would severely disrupt the provision of Internet infrastructure services across all 10 countries," Hung wrote ^[9].

Scored separately, the two layers do not look alike. By jurisdiction, content delivery scores 8,950 to 10,000 in all ten markets, where 10,000 means a single actor serves the entire market ^[3][2]. IP infrastructure by jurisdiction scores 5,150 to 7,550 ^[6]. By provider, IP infrastructure drops to 1,800 to 4,060, which Hung attributes to strong local ISP markets ^[10], and ISPs that are neither American nor Chinese carry 14.2 to 30.8 percent of provision ^[7].

Hung started from a different premise: that since the Digital Silk Road launched in 2015, China has dominated Internet infrastructure and digital resources across the Global South ^[13]. China-registered companies held no more than 3.9 percent of the CDN market between 2024 and 2026, against 95.9 to 99.6 percent for US-registered companies ^[4][5]. At the floor of the American range and the ceiling of the Chinese one, the US share is about 25 times larger ^[1]. The findings "go beyond what I expected based on my understanding of China's control over the Global South, especially in Southeast Asia," Hung wrote ^[14].

Hung pulled the top 1,000 most popular websites per country from the Google Chrome User Experience Report and ran three CDN and IP lookup approaches to identify the serving company and its jurisdiction ^[1]. That sample is consumer browsing popularity, so government and enterprise estates fall outside it, and the 3.9 percent ceiling describes what Chrome users loaded. In most countries only a handful of CDNs serve that content, with Singapore the outlier ^[11]. Hung is a quantitative sociologist and a 2026 Pulse Research Fellow, and the Internet Society says the views in the post are the author's own ^[12].

Every jurisdiction-level figure in the study clears the high-concentration threshold; the only score below 2,500 is the bottom of the provider-level IP range ^[4]. For a team with regional dependencies, that splits the work: outage planning points at one company, legal exposure at one government. Multi-CDN spend buys availability in the region, and it rarely buys a second jurisdiction, because US-registered providers hold 95.9 to 99.6 percent of the market ^[5].