Review of Gateways. Comparing Digital Communication Systems in Nordic Welfare States (Nordicom, 2023), by Signe Sophus Lai and Sofie Flensburg
We’ve been barking up the wrong tree. Or, at least, while barking up the one, we’ve missed the other. While our attention has been focused on the frontend, we lost sight of the backend. The frontend, that is fake news, algorithmic bias, hate speech, troll armies, harmful content, privacy violations… you name it. Signe Sophus Lai and Sofie Flensburg, both researchers from the Copenhagen University, in their book Gateways. Comparing Digital Communication Systems in Nordic Welfare States (Open access here) wants to draw our attention to the hidden backend of these well-known phenomena:
To understand the problems and changes that occur at the frontend – …we need to understand what happens at the backend.
“To understand the problems and changes that occur at the frontend – the interfaces that meet us when we click on a website or open a mobile app – we need to understand what happens at the backend. [T] he Internet is, above all, a physical network made up of cables, servers, terminals, radio wave signals, and data packages destined for IP addresses worldwide.”
Who Owns the Internet?
All these physical resources are built, owned and controlled by someone. And although backend infrastructure is a business of its’ own, we encounter the same players that have acquired monopolies for their frontend-services: Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon are controlling fibre-optic submarine cables, operating systems, third-party tools for collecting and monetising data, and more.
Terms of service violate welfare state principles if they refuse to guarantee universal access to the Internet and equal conditions.
From a welfare state perspective, this is a problem, because the very idea of a welfare state rests on the assumption that services which are central to the functioning and wellbeing of a society should be within the state’s control. This concerns the terms of service as well as the reliability of services. Terms of service violate welfare state principles if they refuse to guarantee universal access to the Internet and equal conditions. With tracking and personalized pricing, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook can indeed easily violate this condition. And as reliability is concerned: If one of the Tech Giants decides to shut down certain services for whatever reason, this could have a drastic impact on the daily lives of citizens. And to the extent that governments services such as healthcare and education or state-owned broadcast media are not only offering but also relying on digital services, even state’s functioning would be affected.
China, Cash and Cards
It’s not only a story about our short-sighted or biased attention, but also about an almost complete gap of knowledge concerning who -owns-what with regard to backend infrastructure
Gateways is not the only recent publication that aims at uncovering the Internet’s backend. Jonathan E. Hillman’s The Digital Silk Road: China’s Quest to Wire the World and Win the Future (2022), too, zooms in on the Internet’s physical backend. Here, the conceived threat is not commercialization (as opposed to public ownership and control), but national sovereignty and digital safety (US vs. China). Another path is opened by Brett Scott in his book, Cloud Money. Why the War on Cash Endangers Our Freedom (2022). Scott, who’s role is more that of an activist than that as a researcher, follows Lai and Flensburg in stressing the contrast of commercial vs. public, while looking not at cables and operating systems, but at digital payments and the takeover of our money-infrastructure by corporate players. In the realm of payment services, we are already experiencing what it means to rely upon a very few commercial actors for basic needs. “Maestro” is withdrawing from the European market this year. Citizens who want to pay with their card while travelling abroad must switch to Visa or Mastercard – often with much less favourable conditions. And even Visa, rumours state, delivers to the European market only as an opportunity to re-sell an already established service. Since the EU has, in 2015, capped interchange fees, the company can charge only up to 0,3% of the transaction value, while in the US it’s 2%.
Lai and Flensburg, the authors of Gateways, clearly take on the role of academic researchers, not political activists. Nevertheless, they perceive their work as an important step towards political action. It’s not only a story about our short-sighted or biased attention, but also about an almost complete gap of knowledge concerning who -owns-what with regard to backend infrastructure. With Gateways, they aim to close this gap.
Enter the IXPs
No regulations at all are directed at submarine cable markets, concentration, and ownership structures
Who owns what? And how are things regulated? Take submarine cables, for instance – cables that bring “the Internet” from one continent to another. No regulations at all, Lai and Flensburg reveal, are directed at submarine cable markets, concentration, and ownership structures—”making”submarine cables an ‘orphan’ in international law”. More or less the same applies to Internet Exchange Points, the Internet’s crossroads or hubs run by commercial companies: “There is no agency or established policies targeting IXPs specifically outside the realm of cybersecurity”.
Now What?
What’s the takeaway? Gateways delivers what it promises: a dense picture of how the Internet’s backbone has evolved in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Norway in the recent past. The book is full of charts, for instance for broadband subscriptions (who uses mobile, who DSL?), market share of subscription providers, diagrams showing the increase of numbers and length of submarine cables, types of companies involved in submarine cable laying, market actors involved in Nordic submarine cables, market ownership of Nordic IXPs, top websites and their hosting companies, charts displaying the number of individuals using the Internet for online telephone and video calls, and the like. As often with data, the story is complex, and it’s difficult to sum it all up in a single number or diagram, although Alphabet, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft clearly stand out as major players in most of the data.
Lai and Flensburg’s conclusion: For now, things are as they are. There does not seem to be an urgent concern. But this, exactly, might be the problem. In the more and more digitalized and datafied Nordic societies, they sum up, Big Tech has already “taken over key gatekeeping functions while simultaneously weakening the structural conditions and institutions of the welfare states.” The real question, they pose, is: What will the Nordic societies look like in a hundred years?
JFK’s Love Letter – Mail Distribution Disruption
The following story, used by the authors of “Gateways” throughout their book, illustrates the otherwise rather abstract topic: In 1955, John F. Kennedy sat down with pen and paper to write a letter to his long-distance love, Gunilla von Post, who lived in Stockholm. Almost the entire journey of the letter would be organized by state services (remember that even airplanes, these days, were run by state-owned companies). A similar love letter, sent back from Gunilla to JFK, would take a different and maybe longer route. That route would last for just two milliseconds. Almost every intersection and every segment of that route would be served by Big Tech companies.
Read the book via Open access here