Understanding Infrastructure as (Internet) Governance

This chapter takes stock of work conducted in the last decade to address how the concept of infrastructure—more particularly information and digital infrastructure, in its different “materialities”—can be mobilised as a heuristic instrument to understand the governance of information and digital technology, especially the Internet. The chapter discusses the extent to which the infrastructural quality of the “network of networks”, rather than natural or inherent, is relational and conditional; and it will examine how, for a better understanding of the “politics of infrastructure”, it is necessary to get behind the scenes of what has often been seen as background and “boring” preconditions to the real work of politics and the production of knowledge. By means of both a literature review and the discussion of pertinent examples, the chapter will explore how infrastructures can be understood as fundamental loci for the exercise of economic and political power. The unveiling of how this power, which is often implicit and held in the background, unfolds, is crucial to reveal the conflicts around what an infrastructure is, who can benefit from it or contest it. In the final part of the chapter, I identify a set of trends at the crossroads of infrastructure studies and Internet governance research, which are both ways in which Internet governance itself is evolving in practice, and an agenda for research that concerns it in the near future.