“This is not how we imagined it”: Technological affordances, economic drivers, and the Internet architecture imaginary

Abstract

The Internet architecture is widely perceived as engine for innovation by providing the equal opportunity to deploy new protocols and applications. This view reflects an imaginary that guides the co-production of policy and technology that can be traced back to the early days of the Internet, which is still prominent among the engineers in one of the main governance bodies of the Internet, the Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF). After the privatization of the Internet architecture in the 1990s, the interplay between the architectural principles of end-to-end, permissionless innovation, and openness subverted equality among Internet users and hampered their ability to redesign the Internet. I draw on media studies, science and technology studies and international political economy, and use a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to show how the Internet architecture’s affordance structure got reconfigured, and how this facilitated the prioritization of corporate interests over the interests of end users.