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'The Internet Infrastructure Has Never Been Open' by Niels ten Oever
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"Openness is liberalism’s favourite paradigm. It emerged in response to the perceived ‘closedness’ of the so-called Second World during the Cold War (Edwards 1996)"
"openness can exist in infrastructure, but that it will always be openness for a particular group. Uses that go against that will be deprioritised, antagonised, and eventually written out."
"The logics of security and profit both demand selective openness: enough transparency to sustain innovation and connectivity, but sufficient closure to enable monitoring and monetisation. Extraction depends on predictable, measurable flows of data, which are only possible within infrastructures that are open enough to connect but closed enough to control."
"In response [to US fascism], states are trying to erect barriers, but are noticing it is not easy to do so on a network that ‘does not recognise borders.’ Countries and regions are dusting off old strategies of industrial policy, but are having a hard time fitting them within the neoliberal ideologies of our times, where the government is generally understood as inefficient in comparison to the market as a structuring and organising mechanism. Notions of strategic autonomy and digital sovereignty collide with the inertia of infrastructures built on the concrete foundations of the Cold War."
EU rules for free market competition mean that US firms cannot be prohibited from participating attempts to replicate open standards locally. There is also nothing preventing US tech giants from simply acquiring the smaller, local firms that do build European infrastructure. Indeed, this has happened Gaia-X, a past European digital sovereignty initiative.
"Creating a communication network that functions as an open infrastructure would mean limiting its scale and use to protect users from coercion, control, extraction, and capture. It would mean undoing the excommunication of the user from the design and control over the network, and reintroducing them as citizens who would be able to observe, contest, and configure the network in meaningful ways (Galloway et al. 2013; ten Oever 2023)."
"Understanding openness as always situated and partial allows us to imagine infrastructures differently; not as systems open to everyone in the abstract, but as deliberately limited commons that protect against domination. Genuine openness, paradoxically, may lie in collective limitation: infrastructures that refuse universality to sustain equality."
