Are We One Hop Away From A Better Internet?

The Internet suffers from well-known performance, reliability, and security problems. However, proposed improvements have seen little adoption due to the difficulties of Internet-wide deployment. We observe that, instead of trying to solve these problems in the general case, it may be possible to make substantial progress by focusing on solutions tailored to the paths between popular content providers and their clients, which carry a large share of Internet traffic.In this paper, we identify one property of these paths that may provide a foothold for deployable solutions: they are often very short. Our measurements show that Google connects directly to networks hosting more than 60% of end-user prefixes, and that other large content providers have similar connectivity. These direct paths open the possibility of solutions that sidestep the headache of Internet-wide deployability, and we sketch approaches one might take to improve performance and security in this setting.