A First Look at Public Service Websites from the Affordability Lens

Public service websites act as ofcial gateways to services provided by governments. Many of these websites are essential for citizens to receive reliable information and online government services. However, the lack of afordability of mobile broadband services in many developing countries and the rising complexity of websites create barriers for citizens in accessing these government websites. This paper presents the frst large-scale analysis of the afordability of public service websites in developing countries. We do this by collecting a corpus of 1900 public service websites, including public websites from nine developing countries and for comparison websites from nine developed countries. Our investigation is driven by website complexity analysis as well as evaluation through a recently proposed afordability index. Our analysis reveals that, in general, public service websites in developing countries do not meet the affordability target set by the UN's Broadband Commission. However, we show that several countries can be brought within or closer to the afordability target by implementing webpage optimizations to reduce page sizes. We also discuss policy interventions that can help make access to public service website more afordable. CCS CONCEPTS • Social and professional topics → Computing / technology policy; • Information systems → World Wide Web.