GoKawiilInfrastructure
“We should own our infrastructure.” A lot of people would instinctively nod in agreement with that statement. Yet who “we” refers to shifts depending on the type of infrastructure. Highways, railways, bridges, and ports require nation-scale efforts. The water supply is usually put into the hands of municipalities. And the desire to own infrastructure goes down to a much smaller level: Owning your home is a dream for many—though such ownership doesn’t necessarily have to be organized on an individual level. Instead, cooperatives or city-owned housing can provide similar benefits.
China’s neo-colonialism, which manifests, among other things, as building and buying infrastructure in sovereign nations, is rightly criticized by many. Not selling your water supply to Nestlé is a universally accepted principle, and landlords are one of the most hated classes.
For a long time, Europe has not held digital services to the same standard. In part, this can be explained by Europe implicitly including American corporations in a collective “we”—an assumption that officially fell apart under the current Trump regime, but should have been regarded with skepticism well before then. Corporations are not our friends. However, the larger factor at play is that Europe simply did not consider digital services infrastructure. While anti-Americanism is en vogue again and drives much of the digital sovereignty movement, Europe must be careful not to simply replace American corporations with European ones, but to strive towards collective ownership instead.
Under capitalism, profit-oriented companies will always play a part in building and even operating our infrastructure. However, they need to be forced into a position where they are easily replaceable. It’s acceptable to hire a company to build a road, but when it comes to maintaining and repairing it half a century later, we need to be able to hire a different company for the job. It’s acceptable to hire a company to build and operate the backbone transmission lines, but we don’t want that company to own the entire power grid. We want smaller players to be able to connect to and interoperate within the grid. That’s where open standards come in.
The Internet used to be—and to some degree still is—built around standards. A data center operator can buy servers from one company, switches from another, routers from a third, and connect them to a backbone internet provider that runs hardware from yet another company. If a company goes out of business or shifts to anti-consumer practices, the next generation of hardware can easily be ordered from a different vendor. The need for and the benefits of this supply chain independence are easily understood even by people who don’t operate data centers for a living. However, when it comes to communication tools, even the tech-literate fail to apply the same critical scrutiny.
After breathing, eating, and procreating, communicating is probably the fourth most important thing humans do. Yet we often fail to recognize our communication tools as part of our infrastructure.
Digital rights advocates often point to Signal, Wire and Threema as examples of communication tools developed and operated by entities with slightly more ethical business practices than their Big Tech counterparts. What most privacy enthusiasts fail to understand is that these companies are still in the business of operating walled gardens with no escape. They do not interoperate. It’s not that Signal has done something inherently malicious—although paying its CEO close to a million dollars a year and running its servers on AWS are certainly questionable—it’s that we don’t have a hedge in place if it ever does.
Open-source software is orthogonal to this problem. It helps to ensure that the software isn’t spyware—unlike WhatsApp and other Meta products—and that the end-to-end encryption is sound, but it does not protect us if Signal shuts down its servers tomorrow or ceases EU operations. Open-source alone is not sufficient to meet the requirements we should have for our infrastructure.
To live up to the standards we set for ourselves, we need to design systems in which self-hosting is structurally possible but not strictly necessary. Like owning a home, running your own server should be possible, and so should collective ownership. Digital systems can and should replicate the advantages of cooperative housing alongside those of individual ownership.
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