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Over the past two decades, a desire to reduce transit cost, improve control over routing and performance, and enhance the quality of experience for users, has yielded a more densely connected, flat network with fewer hops between sources and destinations. The shortening of paths in terms of the number of hops or links has also meant, for what is at the end an infrastructure-bound network, the lengthening of many of these links. In this paper, we focus on an important aspect of the evolving logical connectivity of the Internet that has received little attention to date: intercontinental long-haul links. We develop a methodology and associated processing system for identifying long haul links in traceroute measurements. We apply this system to a large corpus of traceroute data and report on multiple aspects of long haul connectivity including country-level prevalence, routers as international gateways, preferred long-haul destinations, and the evolution of these characteristics over a 7 year period. We identify over 9K layer 3 links that satisfy our definition for intercontinental long haul with many of them terminating in a relatively small number of nodes. An analysis of connected components shows a clearly dominant one with a relative size that remains stable despite a significant growth of the long-haul infrastructure.

The Domain Name System (DNS) is both a key determinant of users' quality of experience (QoE) and privy to their tastes, preferences, and even the devices they own. Growing concern about user privacy and QoE has brought a number of alternative DNS services, from public DNS to encrypted and Oblivious DNS. While offering valuable features, these DNS variants are operated by a handful of providers, reinforcing a trend towards centralization that has raised concerns about privacy, competition, resilience and Web QoE. The goal of this work is to let users take advantage of third-party DNS services, without sacrificing privacy or performance. We follow Wheeler's advice, adding another level of indirection with an end-system DNS resolver, Onoma, that improves privacy, avoiding DNS-based user-reidentification by inserting and sharding requests across resolvers, and improves performance by running resolution races among resolvers and reinstating the client-resolver proximity assumption content delivery networks rely on. As our evaluation shows, while there may not be an ideal service for all clients in all places, Onoma dynamically finds the best service for any given location.

The quality of experience with the mobile web remains poor, partially as a result of complex websites and design choices that worsen performance, particularly for users in suboptimal networks or devices. Prior proposed solutions have seen limited adoption due in part to the demand they place on developers and content providers, and the performing infrastructure needed to support them. We argue that Document and Permissions Policies -- an ongoing effort to enforce good practices on web design -- may offer the basis for a readily-available and easily-adoptable solution. In this paper, we evaluate the potential performance cost of violating well-understood policies and how common such violations are in today's web. Our analysis show, for example, that controlling for unsized-media policy, something applicable to 70% of the top-1million websites, can indeed reduce Cumulative Layout Shift metric., Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, submitted to HotMobile 2021