Dutch business community's support for modern internet standards is creeping up
Improvement of 5 percentage points over 3.5 years
Over the last 3.5 years, use of modern internet (security) standards for Dutch business websites has increased by 5 percentage points, from 60.3 per cent to 65.4 per cent. The differences in the levels of support amongst businesses in different size brackets have largely disappeared, but significant inter-sector discrepancies remain. The financial services sector boasts the highest support score (76 per cent), and has also achieved the biggest growth (18 percentage points over a 4-year period).
A similar picture emerges where e-mail standards are concerned. Support is about 60 per cent amongst businesses in all size brackets, while the health care sector, the property rental sector, the communications sector and the hospitality sector out-perform the rest with scores of about 63 per cent.
The findings summarised above are the overall results from an annual survey that Statistics Netherlands has conducted for the Ministry of Economic Affairs since 2020, as published in Use of Internet Standards for Business Websites. The data is obtained by scanning a sample of the websites listed by respondents to the Statistics Netherlands' annual survey of ICT use by businesses. Although the great majority (80 per cent) of the scanned domains are .nl domains, some fall under other TLDs (mainly .com and .eu). The sample domains are scanned using the Internet.nl test tools, and this year's survey was performed in April.
IPv6 for the web
When the results are broken down on the basis of the individual standards, some interesting differences emerge. For example, almost 50 per cent more small business websites are IPv6-enabled than big business websites (32 per cent compared with 23 per cent).
The sector-by-sector breakdown shows that the financial services sector and the logistics sector have made great progress over the last 2 years. By contrast, the ICT sector and the energy sector have gone backwards considerably, perhaps because of dual-stack configurations being neglected ("IPv6 brokenness").
Figure 1: percentage of companies with websites with successful category 'IPv6' per company size category.
Figure 2: percentage of companies with websites with successful category 'IPv6' per industry.
DNSSEC for the web
Where DNSSEC is concerned, the standout observation is the high scores of the financial services, health care and hospitality sectors.
Figure 3: percentage of companies with websites with successful 'DNSSEC' category by industry.
IPv6 for e-mail
Support for e-mail security standards follows a similar pattern to that seen with web standards: 29 per cent of small businesses' e-mail is IPv6-enabled, while the figure for larger businesses is only 15 per cent. Major discrepancies between economic sectors are also apparent. That may reflect the fact that small businesses are more likely to use the services of one of the internet giants for their mail than for their websites.
Figure 4: Percentage of companies with websites that passed the 'Modern Address (IPv6)' category for the email test by company size category.
Figure 5: percentage of companies with websites that passed the Modern Address (IPv6) category for the email test by industry.
DNSSEC for e-mail
When we look at mail domains' support for DNSSEC, much the same picture emerges. It's a lot more common for a small business to have a DNSSEC-enabled mail domain than a big business. And, as with IPv6, levels of support vary considerably from sector to sector, with the hospitality sector doing particularly well.
Figure 6: percentage of companies with websites that passed the 'Domain Name Signature (DNSSEC)' category for the email test by company size category.
Figure 7: percentage of companies with websites that passed the 'Domain Name Signature (DNSSEC)' category for the email test by industry.
SPF, DKIM and DMARC
Although large businesses are less likely to support IPv6 and DNSSEC than their smaller counterparts, the situation is reversed when it comes to supporting the e-mail authentication standards SPF, DKIM and DMARC. The explanation, Statistics Netherlands believes, is that bigger organisations have much more reason to protect against e-mail spoofing. We would add that the bulk mail carriers have a particular financial interest in developing and implementing such standards: processing and filtering for spam, phishing mail, viruses and other types of malware are very expensive and have an adverse effect on service quality.
Figure 8: percentage of companies with websites that passed the 'Authentication' category (DMARC, DKIM, SPF) for the email test by company size category.
Other internet standards
For information about support for the other internet standards – RPKI, HTTPS and STARTTLS/DANE – visit the Statistics Netherlands website. Be aware, however, that Statistics Netherlands had to correct its report after publication, and that there are inconsistencies in the data currently available online.
If you'd like to know whether your own web or mail domain (or someone else's) supports modern internet standards, you can test it yourself using the Internet.nl test portal.