critical infrastructure lab

The Internet Infrastructure Has Never Been Open, by Niels ten Oever

This chapter argues that openness is not a neutral design principle but an expression of infrastructural power. Openness is never evenly distributed, but rather catering to a particular group capable of configuring and leveraging the underpinning material infrastructure. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies and infrastructure studies scholarship, particularly the concept of inscription (Akrich 1992), I demonstrate how the internet’s openness has been selectively available to different actors: the US military, industry, intelligence services, states, and closed to others, such as civil society. Through analysis of internet protocol development, including the QUIC transport protocol and domain name verification proposals, I show how participation in ostensibly open governance processes does not equate to the capacity to inscribe values or structural changes into technical systems. Civil society actors may speak to legitimize, but cannot configure; their openness remains conditional and revocable. The chapter traces how military origins, commercial reconfiguration, and surveillance infrastructures have shaped an internet that is simultaneously open for extraction and closed to meaningful public control. Against contemporary policy initiatives such as the European “EuroStack” and digital public infrastructure frameworks that uncritically equate openness with publicness, I argue that genuine infrastructural openness may paradoxically require deliberate limitation and direction. If infrastructures cannot be equally accessible to all groups simultaneously, then sustainable civilian infrastructures must be understood not as universally open systems but as deliberately limited commons that protect against domination, extraction, and capture.