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29.04.2025 16:12

Unequal Internet: study highlights differences between websites from developing and developed countries

Felix Koltermann Unternehmenskommunikation
CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security

The Internet may be a global phenomenon, but its often-claimed global nature is tempered by the ‘digital divide’ – digital participation still heavily depends on economic conditions. CISPA researcher Masudul Bhuiyan from CISPA Faculty Dr. Cristian-Alexander Staicu’s team explored whether security and data privacy differences can be found on websites as well. His study of 200,000 websites from 20 developing and developed countries concludes that websites in developing and emerging countries are generally smaller and less complex, more prone to efficiency issues, but conversely, potentially less vulnerable to security risks.

Differences in digitalization between developing and developed countries involve a variety of factors. “Previous studies have primarily examined macro-level indicators, such as the availability of Internet, smartphone usage, or general technological infrastructure,” CISPA researcher Masudul Bhuiyan explains. These studies show that only 60 percent of the population in developing countries are online, whereas in developed countries, the figure is 93 percent. Conversely, people in developing countries rely more on mobile Internet. Also, technical development there is often rapid and skips entire development stages, which is known as the leapfrogging phenomenon. “Anecdotal stories in the community also suggest that websites in industrialized nations and developing and emerging countries differ significantly. We wanted to know whether there was any truth to this hypothesis,” says Bhuiyan.

Globally unique dataset as a database

For the study, Bhuiyan and his colleagues examined 10,000 websites from each of the ten most populous developing countries and the ten most populous developed countries. “We based this on the definition of the International Monetary Fund (IMF),” says the CISPA researcher. Based on IMF’s classification, the developing countries China, India, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Russia, Mexico and the Philippines as well as the developed countries USA, Japan, Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, South Korea, Spain, Canada and Australia were selected for this study. The researchers then selected the 10,000 most popular websites per country. This criterion meant that the Philippines were included in the sample instead of Ethiopia, as there were not enough websites of sufficient size there. The websites were assigned to a country if they either used the corresponding country code top-level domain, such as .de, or if an address that could be assigned to the country was given in the WHOIS protocol information. “We used the Google Lighthouse and Puppeteer tools to crawl a total of 200,000 websites,” explains Bhuiyan. “We then specifically examined the website size and complexity, performance optimization, security measures such as the use of https instead of http, data protection applications such as the use of cookies and the integration of current technological features.”

Unclear picture: differences smaller and less significant than expected

“The result of our investigation is that websites in developing countries are generally smaller and simpler in structure than those in industrialized countries,” explains Bhuiyan.” This suits the use of mobile internet, which is widespread in these countries. Nevertheless, the websites incorporate less efficient programming techniques in some respects. For example, inefficient image formats, unnecessary code, and often a lack of responsive design can be found. The use of https, which enables encrypted connections, is also less common.” The CISPA researcher was surprised that the differences between the two groups were not as significant as expected: “In some cases, the differences between individual countries within a group are greater than those between the groups,” Bhuiyan says.

The findings on the use of trackers and cookie were also revealing. “We found more trackers on websites from developed countries than on those from developing countries,” mentions Bhuiyan. “The reason is that in developed countries tend to adopt more sophisticated advertising strategies, which rely heavily on trackers — even in the presence of stricter data protection laws.” An unexpected trend was observed when looking at vulnerabilities: Websites in developed countries tend to include more vulnerable libraries, which could potentially be exploitable. “One explanation could be the greater importance of JavaScript libraries for websites in developed countries,” explains the CISPA researcher. “Not only do these improve the functionality of the websites, but they also increase their attack surfaces.”

Outlook and further research desiderata

“The interesting thing about our study,” explains Bhuiyan, “is that we did not find a single major distinguishing factor between the countries. For this reason, further research is necessary. A major success, however, is that we were able to compile this huge dataset, which other researchers can now use.” The dataset with the 200,000 crawled websites is available for download to interested parties on the developer platform GitHub. For the first time, comprehensive datasets featuring websites from countries like Nigeria, Bangladesh, or the Philippines – regions that have so far not been in the focus of IT security research – can be found there.

Bhuiyan intends to focus his future research partially on websites from Southeast Asia. “In the current study, we noticed that many websites from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are in English,” he explains. “The problem with this is that only a small portion of the population there speaks English. We want to investigate which impact language usage on the accessibility of websites as well as the handling of security warnings has.” With this, the CISPA researcher can continue his drive to make the internet as inclusive as possible.

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Originalpublikation:

Bhuiyan, Masudul Hasan Masud; Varvello, Matteo; Staicu, Cristian-Alexandru; Zaki, Yasir (2025). Digital Disparities: A Comparative Web Measurement Study Across Economic Boundaries. CISPA. Conference contribution. https://doi.org/10.60882/cispa.28365449.v1

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Visualization to the paper "A Comparative Web Measurement Study Across Economic Boundaries"

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