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A Framework for Improving

Web Affordability and Inclusiveness

Rumaisa Habib*

Sarah

Tanveer*

Aimen

Inam

Haseeb

Ahmed

Ayesha

Ali

Zartash

Uzmi

Zafar

Qazi

Ihsan

Qazi

* Joint first authors

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How ‘worldwide’ is access to the World Wide Web?

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How would stakeholders benefit from Web equity?

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How do we work towards equitable Web access?

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Social stigma

Coverage

Censorship

Digital Literacy

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Social stigma

Coverage

Censorship

Digital Literacy

Cost of web access

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Broadband price

Webpage size

Cost of web access

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Difficulties in web access

  • 48% of respondents had difficulty paying for their mobile data
    • World Bank survey in 11 emerging countries
  • Rising webpage sizes and stagnant broadband prices
    • 13.8x median increase in page size in the past decade
    • 2020-21
      • 0.02% decrease in broadband price
      • 2.3% increase in webpage size
  • Each access has become more expensive

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Variations in…

206 countries

ITU dataset

99 countries

Alexa top 1000

~72k webpages

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broadband price

web complexity

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Variations in…

Three data plans

94 countries do not meet the 2% target

(set by the UN Broadband commission)

for the 2GB DO plan

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206 countries

ITU dataset

99 countries

Alexa top 1000

~72k webpages

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}

web complexity

broadband price

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Variations in…

non cached Page sizes in…

​

…developing regions: 2.87 MB

…developed regions: 2.64 MB

​

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206 countries

ITU dataset

99 countries

Alexa top 1000

~72k webpages

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web complexity

broadband price

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PAW Index

novel fairness metric to quantify affordability…

reduction required in avg. page size by each country to equalize web access

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PAW Index

reduction required in avg. page size by each country to equalize web access

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PAW Index

reduction required in avg. page size by each country to equalize web access

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48* out of 96 countries have a PAW > 1

(for at least one plan)

* all of which are developing

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Approaches

  • Reducing broadband prices
    • ISPs have limited margins already
    • Large systematic change that cannot be easily done

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  • Reducing webpage sizes
    • Can be fine tuned
    • Easy to implement

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Approaches

  • Reducing broadband prices
    • ISPs have limited margins already
    • Large systematic change that cannot be easily done

​

  • Reducing webpage sizes
    • Can be fine tuned
    • Easy to implement

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How ‘worldwide’ is access to the World Wide Web?

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How would stakeholders benefit from Web equity?

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How do we work towards equitable Web access?

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Do users even want their webpages reduced?

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⬆ Quality

⬇ Accesses

⬇ Quality

⬆ Accesses

🤔

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Do users even want their webpages reduced?

  • 100 participants
  • 10 webpages

with varying levels of reduction

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Do users even want their webpages reduced?

  • 100 participants
  • 10 webpages

with varying levels of reduction

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willing to trade off webpage quality for number of accesses

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Other Stakeholders

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Website Operators

Mobile Network Operators

more users online → increased revenue

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So now that we know that…

… this problem exists

​

​

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So now that we know that…

… this problem exists

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… people are willing to adopt solutions

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How ‘worldwide’ is access to the World Wide Web?

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How would stakeholders benefit from Web equity?

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How do we work towards equitable Web access?

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AW4A

Affordable Web For All

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Prior work

What went wrong?

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Prior work

What went wrong?

1 Breaks pages

2 Lack of web developer consent (impacts revenue)

3 Violated net neutrality principles

4 Broke end-to-end encryption

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Google Weblight 1,2,4

Facebook Free Basics 3

Opera Mini 1,2

Brave 1,2

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Goals & principles

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Goals & principles

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Use PAW as a target

G1

sizes based on affordability

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Goals & principles

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Use PAW as a target

Server-side webpage transcoding

G1

sizes based on affordability

G2

user privacy & developer consent

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Optimization problem

  1. Maximize page quality
  2. Given a page size limit

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page quality

sum of object sizes

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Optimization problem

  • Maximize page quality
  • Given a page size limit

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Two stages

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Two stages

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Two stages

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Two stages

  • Grid search vs HBS (two columns)

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Zooming into stage 2…

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HBS

  • Heuristics Based Approach
  • Uses a set of heuristics
  • Lower quality pages
  • Linear run time

Grid Search

  • Brute Force Approach
  • Searches discrete space
  • Higher quality pages
  • Exponential run time

VS

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A sneak peak into the (image) heuristics

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Area on the webpage

Bytes efficiency

Image A

Image B

Greater Δbytes

Lesser Δbytes

for the same change in quality:

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A sneak peak into the (image) heuristics

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Area on the webpage

Bytes efficiency

Image A

Image B

Greater Δbytes

Lesser Δbytes

for the same change in quality:

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A sneak peak into the (image) heuristics

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Area on the webpage

Bytes efficiency

Image A

Image B

Greater Δbytes

Lesser Δbytes

for the same change in quality:

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Quality of webpages produced by HBS

Half of the pages maintain a quality* of 0.98 or higher

* weighted avg. of the quality of objects on a page

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Quality of webpages produced by HBS

Users slightly preferred HBS over

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Brave Opera Mini

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Future work… what now?

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  • Involve governments to optimize regional sites
  • Make the framework more accessible to developers
    • Deploying it and involving it in development pipelines
  • Video affordability
    • How can we transcode videos?

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Conclusion

We show that…

… lack of affordability is a key barrier in accessing the web

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… users are willing to trade quality for quantity of access

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… there are practical solutions to improve affordability

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Thank you!

For more details…

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… contact 📨 us at rumaisa@stanford.edu or 23100099@lums.edu.pk

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… view our source code 💻 at https://github.com/nsgLUMS/sigcomm2023-aw4a

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… and check out the full paper 😎

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Backup Slides >>

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Gzip compression

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PAW Index equation

𝑃𝑖 : average broadband price in region 𝑖

𝑃𝑇 : target broadband price (2% of a country’s GNIpc)

𝑊𝑖,𝑎𝑣𝑔 : average page sizes in region 𝑖

𝑊𝑔𝑙𝑜𝑏𝑎𝑙 : average page size globally

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