In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses the technique APNIC Labs uses to measure end user behaviour in the global internet. This is probably the only worldwide web advert based measurement system in continuous use since 2010.

Originally written in Adobe Flash, the system is now coded in Javascript and HTML5, and continuously samples as many as 25 million users per day, across mobile devices and desktop PCs, Android, iPhone and Chromebook.

The system was first designed to inform the community on the rate of IPv6 deployment. The APNIC Labs measurements now encompass IPv6, RTT, HTTP/3 (Quic) adoption, DNSSEC, use of public DNS resolvers, IPv6 EH support, RPKI validation amongst other measurements.

Data is available at a per-economy, and per-AS (origin-AS) level, both as a web view and as JSON downloads. No end user identifying material is held, or distributed in any way. The measurement program is generously supported by Google, ICANN and APNIC.

Read more about some recent research outcomes from the labs advert on the APNIC Blog:

Measuring the use of DNSSEC (September 2023, Geoff Huston)
Measuring NXDOMAIN responses (July 2023, Geoff Huston)
A Further Update on IPv6 Extension Headers (June 2023, Geoff Huston)
A second look at QUIC use (September 2022, Geoff Huston)

How APNIC Labs measures the world using adverts