DEERBORN, Mich. – The results of a two-year study by Arbor Networks, the University of Michigan and Merit Network Inc. has determined 6 percent of all internet traffic originates with Google.Five years ago, internet traffic was distributed proportionally across tens of thousands of enterprise-managed websites and servers around the world. Today, most content has migrated to a small number of very large hosting, cloud and content providers. Out of the 40,000 routed end sites on the internet, 30 large companies — “hyper giants” like Limelight, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and YouTube — now generate and consume a disproportionate 30 percent of all internet traffic, the study notes.

According to the study, over the past five years internet traffic has migrated away from the traditional internet core of 10 to 12 Tier-1 international transit providers. Today, the majority of internet traffic by volume flows directly between large content providers, datacenters and consumer networks. Consequently, most Tier-1 networks have evolved their business models away from IP wholesale transit to focus on broader cloud or enterprise services, content hosting and virtual private networks.

During the same five years, macroeconomic forces radically transformed the global internet commercial ecosystem. Economic changes, including the collapse of wholesale IP transit and a dramatic growth in advertisement-supported services, reversed decade-old business dynamics between transit providers, consumer networks and content providers. Service providers now offer everything from triple-play services to managed security services, VPNs and increasingly, content-delivery networks. This change in the internet business ecosystem has significant ongoing implications for backbone engineering, design of internet scale applications and research.

“Saying the internet has changed dramatically over the last five years is cliché,” said Arbor Networks Chief Scientist Craig Labovitz. “The internet is always changing dramatically. However, over the course of the last five years, we’ve witnessed the start of an equally dramatic shift in the fundamental business of the internet.”

In addition, a consolidation of protocols has affected traffic flow. Historically, internet applications communicated across a panoply of application-specific protocols and communication stacks. Today, the majority of internet-application traffic has migrated to an increasingly small number of Web and video protocols, including video over Web and Adobe Flash. Other mechanisms for video and application distribution, like peer-to-peer networks, have declined dramatically in the past two years, the study says.

“The data collected through this study and the trends that have been identified provide important insight for researchers and practitioners into the current direction and nature of internet traffic and usage,” said Farnam Jahanian, chairman of the Computer Science and Engineering department at the University of Michigan and co-founder of Arbor Networks, a provider of security and network management solutions. “This will be of great value in informing further research and development efforts into the nature of communications and security technologies that are integral to internet evolution.”

The study is believed to be the largest ever of global Web traffic since the advent of the commercial internet in the mid-1990s. The resulting “Internet Observatory Report” offers analysis of two years’ worth of detailed traffic statistics from 110 large and geographically diverse cable operators, international transit backbones, regional networks and content providers.

At its peak, the study monitored more than 12 terabits-per-second and a total of more than 256 exabytes of internet traffic. A main source of data analyzed for the report was gathered from ATLAS — an ongoing collaborative effort among more than 100 internet service providers distributed across 17 countries, all of which share anonymous security, traffic and routing data on an hourly basis.

“This study shows that the trends we have been seeing on our network are not unique to the education community,” said Merit Network Chief Executive Officer Donald Welch. Merit is a nonprofit corporation owned and governed by Michigan’s public universities. “The implications for end-users are significant. They can expect to see better service as the content moves closer to them from a network perspective. The impact is even greater for peer communities like education networks.”

The study’s authors plan to present their findings Monday during NANOG47 in Dearborn, Mich.