National Dependency in the Information Age

While many governments are working to improve their information infrastructure, a significant number of governments throughout the world do not have the capacity to host their own websites. A third of all countries maintain websites with commercial hosting services in the United States. One-quarter of all countries maintain government websites on servers in other countries.

For each country we determined whether there were websites for five branches of the government (legislative, judiciary, and executive branches, as well as the revenue authority and foreign affairs ministry).

Even though every country in the world has been assigned a top-level domain name, not all have the organizational will or capacity to maintain websites for these important government offices. WIA researchers found URLs for as many government agency websites for as many countries as possible. Then, using a traceroute program, we attempted to find the location of the host computer for these websites.

Most wealthy countries devote significant resources to maintaining internet portals for important government offices. Some wealthy countries even maintain mirror hosts within the United States, so that queries coming from within the United States may be answered more quickly. But poorer countries are less likely to have the informational infrastructure to maintain websites for their government agencies. E-government services may be less of a priority because other development priorities take precedent or because too few citizens would use such services. Many governments developing countries do not have the technical capacity to maintain such online portals, so they retain commercial hosting services in North America and Europe.

In this interesting way, many developing countries are dependent on wealthier countries because their informational capacity physically resides in those wealthier countries.