Deconstructing Google’s Web Light Service

Abstract

Web Light is a transcoding service introduced by Google to show lighter and faster webpages to users searching on slow mobile clients. The service detects slow clients (e.g., users on 2G) and tries to convert webpages on the fly into a version optimized for these clients. Web Light claims to significantly reduce page load times, save user data, and substantially increase traffic to such webpages. However, there are several concerns around this service, including, its effectiveness in, preserving relevant content on a page, showing third-party advertisements, improving user performance as well as privacy concerns for users and publishers. In this paper, we perform the first independent, empirical analysis of Google’s Web Light service to shed light on these concerns. Through a combination of experiments with thousands of real Web Light pages as well as controlled experiments with synthetic Web Light pages, we (i) deconstruct how Web Light modifies webpages, (ii) investigate how ads are shown on Web Light and which ad networks are supported, (iii) measure and compare Web Light’s page load performance, (iv) discuss privacy concerns for users and publishers and (v) investigate the potential use of Web Light as a censorship circumvention tool.