Traffic to government domains often crosses national borders, or flows through risky bottlenecks

Research summarized by The Register reports that government-bound internet traffic in 58 countries often transits foreign networks and IXPs, sometimes lacks HTTPS, and is frequently concentrated through a small number of providers—raising risks of interception and systemic outages. Examples include Albania’s high foreign routing with low HTTPS adoption and Kazakhstan’s domestic routing but heavy reliance on a single telco, while countries like Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, and the US distribute traffic across multiple operators for greater resilience.