Leaders and Losers on the Internet

Mitchell L. Moss
Anthony Townsend
Taub Urban Research Center
September 1996

The Internet is reinforcing the economic and intellectual hegemony of a handful of states and regions in the United States. The widespread notion, fostered by futurists, that advanced telecommunications will lead to the rise of small towns and rural area is not borne out by a new study conducted by New York University's Taub Urban Research Center.

Drawing upon data from Matrix Information and Directory Services Inc. (MIDS) and the Netwizards Internet Domain Surveys, we have analyzed the location of Internet hosts in the United States. The data reflects all uniquely named computers connected to the Internet on a full or part-time basis, thus measuring the number of computers engaged in frequent, continual Internet access and service provision. (The majority of dial-up connections are excluded from the study since they are rarely indexed by a unique name.)

The Internet is the nation's emerging information highway and has become widely used by individuals and firms seeking information, marketing new services and products and as a communications medium for businesses, non-profit organizations, political parties, and a vast array of sports, arts, educational and research activities. Access to and use of the Internet is an essential requirement for obtaining timely information and for distributing information that was once only available in libraries or through books, newspapers, magazines, and other publications.

STATES AND THE INTERNET

50% of all US. Internet hosts are located in just five states: California, Massachusetts, New York, Texas, and Virginia (Figure 1). And within these states, Internet hosts are densely concentrated in a small number of metropolitan regions. Furthermore, 90% of all Internet hosts are in 21 states (Figure 2), primarily on the east and west coasts of the nation and in a midwest belt, encompassing the states of Michigan, Minnesota, and Ohio and in a cluster of western states such as Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, Washington, and Texas. More than half of the fifty states do not have a substantial number of Internet hosts.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Whether this represents a natural process of technological diffusion or a technological gap that will grow in the future is not clear at this time.

There is no reason to believe that this information gap will diminish quickly, since familiarity and experience with new technologies can facilitate technological diffusion among workers in close proximity to each other.

Along the Northeast-New England corridor of the United States, there is a significant concentration of the nation's Internet hosts, stretching from Maine to Virginia. The thirteen states and the District of Columbia account for 30.24% of the nation's Internet hosts and 24.68% (additional data) of the nation's population. These states, which represent the original thirteen colonies of the nation, have maintained their technological strength even as their share of the nation's population declined. The 13 eastern seaboard states and California together have almost half of the nation's Internet hosts.

Figure 3

CITIES, METROPOLITAN REGIONS, AND THE INTERNET

The Internet is creating a new set of leaders and losers among the cities and regions of the United States. Five large metropolitan regions in the United States account for approximately one-third of the Internet hosts in the nations. The largest single concentration of Internet hosts is based in Silicon Valley, California encompassing Santa Clara, San Mateo, Alameda and San Francisco counties. This region, which houses major universities, high-tech firms, and computer software companies has almost twice as many Internet hosts as there are in the Southern California's Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties combined. Middlesex County, Massachusetts, the area in which many of the high-tech firms on Route 128 are situated, has 4.3% of the Internet hosts in the United States, the second largest concentration of Internet hosts of any county in the nation. Los Angeles County, California has the third largest concentration of Internet hosts, 2.8% of the nation's total.

Figure 4

In the New York-New Jersey Metropolitan region, Manhattan is the "center of gravity" for the Internet with almost 150,000 Internet hosts in Manhattan (New York County). The only other significant concentrations of Internet hosts in the NY-NJ region are in Mercer County, New Jersey, where Princeton University, research labs, and numerous high-tech companies are located and in Westchester County, New York where several corporate headquarters are based. Within New York State (Figure 5), Internet hosts are lacking in most of the state's 62 counties, with the exception of communities that have major universities or government facilities, such as Tompkins, Monroe, Onondaga, and Rensselaer Counties. It should also be noted that Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island are not among the top 150 counties in the United States with Internet hosts; neither are the four other boroughs of New York City.

Figure 5

Manhattan dominates the city and the surrounding region (Figure 6) when it comes to the Internet. This is due to the enormous number of businesses located in Manhattan and the remarkable concentration of information-intensive firms in the financial service and media industries that are based in Manhattan.

Figure 6

There is a clear hierarchy in the concentration of Internet hosts in major metropolitan regions in the United States. After the top five regions that have 400,000 Internet hosts or more, there is a second tier of regions that include cities such as Pittsburgh, Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Charlotte, North Carolina, Atlanta, Georgia, Dallas and Austin, Texas, Boulder, Colorado, Salt Lake City, Utah, and Seattle, Washington. There is a significant dearth of Internet hosts in the southern states, in parts of New England, and in the states of the Great Plains.

THE INTERNET AND REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Some of the nation's major cities, like Houston, Miami, Detroit, and New Orleans are not major participants in the Internet. Given the heightened role of information in a knowledge-based economy and the high value placed on high-speed communications, the location of Internet hosts suggests that there is a new patterns of "leaders and losers" in modern metropolitan growth. In the nineteenth century, access to a deep-water port was essential for the growth of cities, in the twentieth century, access to the Internet may be the critical factor in regional development. Despite much of the rhetoric surrounding the Internet, high-capacity bandwidth is not available in most households and downloading information from the Internet can take a substantial amount of time. Therefore, universities, corporations, and government facilities with high-capacity links to the Internet offer users a substantial advantage in obtaining and sending information.

TECHNICAL APPENDIX: METHODOLOGY

The data used in this report comes from "Matrix Maps Quarterly #303" by Matrix Information and Directory Services, Inc. of Austin, Texas. Using data from the NetWizards Internet Domain Surveys of January 1995 and 1996, MIDS used proprietary techniques to localize and aggregate the data. The Domain Survey attempts to discover every host on the Internet by doing a complete search of the Domain Name System, the standard mechanism for locating individual computers on the Internet. The data reflects all uniquely named computers connected to the Internet on a full or part time basis, thus measuring the number of computers engaged in frequent, continual Internet access and service provision. The nature of the study tends to exclude the majority of dial-up connections as they rarely are indexed by a unique name.

This data indicated the number of hosts per capita for the 350 most networked counties and all 50 states. Taking the top 150 counties from this list and reordering them by total number of hosts, it was possible to analyze geographic distributions of hosts on national, state, and regional levels. For counties not in the top 350, a range of the number of hosts was available and so the midpoint of that range was used as an approximation of the number of hosts.