Summary

  • Florian Holzbauer and his co-authors begin with 95,498 Eurostat local administrative units across 30 European countries; 69,220 have a linked municipal website domain in the paper's coverage table.
  • The counts for web, mail and DNS thin out separately. A mapped endpoint shows a network-facing service layer; procurement contracts describe who can operate, access, move or replace it.

The rows behind the map

Most public maps begin with what they can draw. Florian Holzbauer's starts with a question: which local administrations belong in the count? In the team's TMA 2026 paper, Municipalytics takes Eurostat's 95,498 Local Administrative Units across the EU and European Economic Area, then links them to municipal web and email records and to Internet measurements. The starting frame is broad; the observable website set is smaller.

The coverage table records 88,948 units with a Wikidata entry and 69,220 with a website-domain field. DNS results narrow the set again: 65,816 A or AAAA records, 62,009 MX records, 56,310 SPF records and 67,103 authoritative name-server records. Each number answers a different question. A web-domain entry is a lead; a resolved address is an observation; an MX record points to mail exchange; an SPF record lists authorized senders. One count cannot stand in for the others.

That distinction gives the map its most useful tension. Europe's local governments can be counted in one statistical frame, while the services citizens reach online appear through several uneven and partly stale records. The paper says the municipality-to-domain link relies on Wikidata, so missing or outdated entries can leave a local unit out. It gives replaced Tyrol domains as an example. The administrative unit itself also varies by country: Portugal's units include freguesias, Cyprus uses communities, and the paper aggregates some Irish and Greek units to parent levels.

The map remains valuable precisely when those edges stay visible. Its public interface lets a reader inspect municipality, region and country views. The paper separates where an endpoint appears to be hosted from the registered country of the organization operating the network. Those are different coordinates. A server's country can be visible while the contract, data-access rules and exit route remain in another file.

Holzbauer is a postdoctoral researcher in IT:U's Secure and Resilient Infrastructures group. The RIPE 93 programme lists Municipalytics in the Cooperation Working Group. His own research profile places the map beside work on Internet measurement, IPv6 and outages. The common method is to make network-facing details countable so an operator or public authority can inspect them.

For a municipality, the practical use is an inventory checkpoint. A web address, an email route and a DNS delegation should have separate owners, refresh dates and confidence notes. When a domain disappears from a later map, an administrator can check whether the service moved, the public record went stale or the measurement changed. A provider-country label can trigger a contract review; it cannot identify the contract signatory or the time required to leave. Those facts sit in the service agreement, subcontractor list and exit plan.

The TMA study is a single snapshot, with public records and network observations as its inputs. That makes the map a starting ledger for review, not a live service monitor. A second dated snapshot would show whether the same services persist; procurement records would show who holds authority to change them. Holzbauer's contribution is a common frame in which those questions can be asked across local units instead of one town at a time.

Primary sources