Reviewed by: The Turn to Infrastructure in Internet Governance ed. by F. Musiani, et al. Jean-Christophe Plantin (bio) The Turn to Infrastructure in Internet Governance. Edited by F. Musiani, D. L. Cogburn, L. Denardis, and N. S. Levinson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pp. xvi+268. $110. The goal of The Turn to Infrastructure in Internet Governance, edited by F. Musiani, D. L. Cogburn, L. Denardis, and N. S. Levinson, is to show how information infrastructures constitute politics by other means. Despite not being designed at first to conduct activities of surveillance, the documents leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013 have described how these infrastructures are increasingly used to enforce control over populations, and to promote a political agenda of states or supra-national institutions. They especially shed light on how the decentralized architecture of the internet could provide the backbone for state surveillance over citizens, either by directly plugging into the cables (such as the now infamous Room 641A of AT&T, used for fiber optic taps), or through collaborations with tech companies to access users’ personal data. The book provides a theoretical framework and a series of case studies to analyze this increasing use of the internet as a proxy to enforce state power—what they describe as governance by internet infrastructure—instead of analysis of the actors, process, and challenges shaping the governance of the internet. Through a theoretical introduction and conclusion and ten chapters, this edited volume both documents and promotes an [End Page 900] “infrastructure turn” in the study of internet governance (IG). The authors situate their work toward the existing study of IG, and this turn is supposed to compensate for the traditional focus on institutions and the tendency to study these institutions as separate entities. On another front, their perspective imports concepts from STS, and more precisely the field of infrastructure studies, to focus on other points: IG is studied by the design and the materiality of information networks, by highlighting the invisible work involved in activities of maintenance, and by embracing the mundane, invisible, and ubiquitous nature of the internet. After this theoretical framework is laid out in the introduction, it is illustrated by a series of case studies organized in three parts: geopolitical conflicts, intellectual property rights, and civil liberties. As my expertise is on the latter, I concentrate below on chapters 8 to 11. The four chapters that constitute “infrastructure as a lever of/in surveillance, privacy, and censorship” offer examples that illustrate how information intermediaries act as important actors to enforce economic, political, or geopolitical agendas of states. The originality here is to cover both the systematic and the exceptional nature of this evolution, and to analyze the multiple facets of this delegation of surveillance to tech companies. N. Arpaignan shows how the data collection practices of companies such as Google or Facebook are very compatible with state surveillance: all the data collection procedures that they have implemented throughout the years for digital marketing are very much in line with the needs of states—a process that S. Luboff describes as “surveillance capitalism.” P. Vargas-Leon focuses on shutdown practices from states (also known as “kill switch”), and shows through a series of examples and technical-legal analysis of these actions how it is hard for states to have complete control over the internet in their territories. It also documents the justifications of this action, usually through a topical drifting presenting internet as critical infrastructure that therefore needs to be defended against terrorism. T. Sargsyan follows by showing the role of information intermediaries in law enforcement, but also how they potentially resist data requests from state agencies, or could potentially help enforcing privacy protection measures. This chapter also demonstrates that enforcing data localization on national servers as a reaction to U.S. surveillance is both economically harmful and enhances states’ capacities of citizen surveillance. J. Laprise presents the technical and legal apparatus of the PRISM program, its history and its potential failure (how to avoid misclassifications of citizens?), and highlights the key role metadata play in this process—due to their unregulated nature (at first), hence allowing their large collection by the National Security Agency, but also due...