Link Search Menu Expand Document
Publications
  1. The politics of infrastructuring

The politics of infrastructuring

The discussion above points towards a different relationship between breakdown and visibility than is usually envisaged in infrastructure studies. Rather than holding a potential for increased visibility, DDoS attacks have – by shifting from exceptional events to perpetual crisis – contributed to the establishment of new intermediaries in the form of DDoS protection providers. As an ever-larger part of internet traffic is being routed through the networks of these intermediaries, it is affected by centrally implemented decision mechanisms that remain opaque to the average user.

70 Christian Sandvig, “The Internet as the Anti-Television: Distribution Infrastructure as Culture and Power”, in Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures, ed. Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 225-45.

71 Ramesh K. Sitaraman et al., “Overlay Networks: An Akamai Perspective”, in Advanced Content Delivery, Streaming, and Cloud Services, ed. Mukaddim Pathan, Ramesh Kumar Sitaraman, and Dom Robinson (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley, 2014), 307-28.

72 https://www.projectshield.withgoogle.com/

73 https://www.cloudflare.com/galileo/

74 https://equalit.ie/portfolio/deflect/

75 https://www.qurium.org/secure-hosting/

This development clearly diverges from earlier incarnations of internet infrastructure that spawned hopes of self-organisation76 and “fringe intelligence.” 77 These hopes were especially tied to the end-to-end principle, where routing and control functions are performed by adaptive decision mechanisms at the edges of the network, whereas the core merely transmits according to basic rules.78 Even if historical investigations point toward the need to nuance this picture, 79 there is an observable shift in how traffic is being processed and analysed. Rather than the “nonsynchronous optimization” of the earlier internet that “prefers to leave the optimal unsettled,” 80 the current situation is, according to McKelvey, characterised by “polychronous optimization”81 that is technically administered by “intermediary daemons.” Ever more fine-grained information about what kinds of traffic are being transported supplies these intermediaries with criteria for “micro-decisions”82 about the routing of data: “The unsettled metastability of the internet is replaced by a regulated system of service guarantees and data limits. The diagram shifts from the edges to the core, with infrastructures progressively taking on greater management capacities.”83

The growing reliance on DDoS protection services is, thus, part of a general development towards traffic management mechanisms that remain opaque to users – and, as such, a new kind of infrastructural invisibility. Taking the long-term consequences of DDoS attacks into consideration, therefore, provides a more comprehensive picture of the power relations emerging from the use of such attacks. This suggests that, when discussing the legitimacy and effectivity of DDoS, it does not

76 Tarleton Gillespie, “Engineering a Principle: ’End-to-End’ in the Design of the Internet”, Social Studies of Science 36, no. 3 (2006): 427-57.

77 Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture. Politics for the Information Age (London, Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2004), 66.

78 Jerome H. Saltzer, David P. Reed, and David D. Clark, “End-to-End Arguments in System Design”, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 2, no. 4 (1984): 277-88.

79 Bradley Fidler, “ The Evolution of Internet Routing: Technical Roots of the Network Society”, Internet Histories 3, no. 3-4 (2 October 2019): 364-87.

80 Fenwick McKelvey,* Internet Daemons: Digital Communications Possessed,* Electronic Mediations 56 (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 113.

81 McKelvey, Internet Daemons, 115.

82 Florian Sprenger, The Politics of Micro-Decisions: Edward Snowden, Net Neutrality, and the Architectures of the Internet (Lüneburg: Meson Press, 2015).

83 McKelvey, Internet Daemons, 115. On the question whether this development should be seen as a practical necessity, see Christopher S. Yoo, The Dynamic Internet: How Technology, Users, and Businesses Are Transforming the Network (Washington, D.C: AEI Press, 2012), 91 and from a more theoretical perspective Paul Dourish, “Protocols, Packets, and Proximity”, in Signal Traffic. Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures, ed. Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski (University of Illinois Press, 2015).

suffice to focus on particular political constellations; rather, there is a need to also reflect upon their impact on an infrastructural level.

What this change of perspective implies is to pay closer attention to the different kinds of temporality involved in DDoS attacks, including a reassessment of established notions of breakdown and visibility. The maintenance approach in infrastructure studies can be seen as one step in this direction. Contrasting an emphasis on the eventfulness of large-scale ruptures with a more process-oriented focus on decay and repair helps to recognise different modes of temporality involved in communication breakdown. Yet, the protection provided by services such as Cloudflare hardly fit the description of small-scale and ad-hoc maintenance. The traffic management performed by these providers is rather systematic, centralised and globally coordinated. Therefore, following Holt, such intermediaries cannot merely be considered “connecting agents or messy middlemen – they are in many cases key infrastructures and primary agents of power.” 84

DDoS protection represents an emerging kind of infrastructure that does not become visible upon breakdown, but rather thrives on it. A promising approach to explore this relationship could be to abandon visuality as a guiding metaphor. As Carmi convincingly argues, sound and listening metaphors are a more apt choice when seeking to theorise persistent forms of communication crises, especially those re-appearing in certain patterns or rhythms. According to her, reoccurring patterns of “media distortions” engender forms of “processed listening” that seek to measure, categorise and filter “deviant” behaviour:

when specific bodies, behaviors and rhythms interfere with media companies’ business model(s), they illegitimize them and filter, remove, delete, and reduce them. They become noise, disturbance, deviant, and spam.85

While Carmi does mention DDoS attacks in passing, an elaborated account of DDoS protection as a form of “processed listening” remains a desiderate. Thinking of these intermediaries as forms of listening would help to refocus attention to forms of temporality other than the event – the progressive weaving of measurement capabilities into the infrastructure of the internet, the continuous adaptation of

84 Jennifer Holt, “Data Troubles: Digital Distribution in the Platform Economy”, On_Culture, no. 8 (2019), http://geb.uni- giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2020/15092/,3.

85 Elinor Carmi, Media Distortions: Understanding the Power behind Spam, Noise, and Other Deviant Media (New York: Peter Lang, 2019), 40.

filtering rules to recurring patterns identified in traffic analysis and the gradual persuasion of website owners to become accustomed to their reliance on protection.

Table of Contents