  We present measurements showing that the top one million most popular Web
domains are reachable within 13ms (in the median) from a collective of just 12
cloud data centers. We explore the consequences of this Web "consolidation",
focusing on its potential for speeding up the evolution of the Web. That most
popular services reside in or near a small number of data centers implies that
new application and transport technologies can be rapidly deployed for these
Web services, without the involvement of their operators. We show how this may
be achieved by orchestrating a handful of reverse proxies deployed in the same
data centers, with new technologies deployed at these proxies being nearly as
effective as deploying them directly to the Web servers. We present early
measurements of this approach, demonstrating a >50% reduction in Web page load
times for users with high latencies to Web servers. We also show that this
model, using a small number of proxies, can be surprisingly competitive with
extensive CDN deployments, especially in geographies with high last-mile
latencies.
