Dissertation Talk: Where in the World is the Internet? Locating Political Power in Internet Infrastructure
With the rise of global telecommunications networks, and especially with the worldwide spread of the Internet, the world is considered to be becoming an information society: a society in which social relations are patterned by information, transcending time and space through the use of new information and communications technologies. Much of the popular press and academic literature on the information society focuses on the dichotomy between the technologically-enabled virtual space of information, and the physical space of the material world. However, to understand the nature of virtual space, and of the information society, it is critical to understand the politics of the technological infrastructure through which they are constructed.
I approached this problem in my dissertation through an examination of the governance of the system of interconnections between the more than 49,000 networks which together form the global Internet. This system of interconnections - known as the "inter-domain routing system" - is perhaps the most critical component of Internet infrastructure: in the absence of these interconnections, there would be no Internet.
In this talk, I will discuss how - quite unusually - the governance of the inter-domain routing system is structured through social relationships of trust amongst the technical personnel who operate Internet infrastructure. Even though established forms of governance - nation states, markets and intergovernmental organizations - do continue to have influence over the Internet, I will show how technical communities must be understood as political actors in their own right in the governance of the Internet.
I conceive of the distributed system of trust relationships amongst technical personnel as a novel model of governance, which I call "distributed governance". I will discuss the possibilities and limits of distributed governance by drawing from my fieldwork in North America and South Asia, to provide perspectives on ways in which distributed governance interacts with more established forms of governance.
Ashwin J. Mathew graduated with his Ph.D. from the UC Berkeley School of Information in 2014. Prior to his studies at UC Berkeley, he spent a decade as a technologist at Adobe Systems, Sun Microsystems, and various other companies. He currently works as an Internet infrastructure researcher at Packet Clearing House, a non-profit research institute that supports operations and analysis in the areas of Internet traffic exchange, routing economics, and global network development.