Net Neutrality and Infrastructure (Sebastian)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mc2aso6W7jQ

    The readings for this week, especially Nicole Starosielski’s “Fixed Flow: Undersea Cables as Media Infrastructure,” reminded me of this video about net neutrality by author and vlogger Hank Green. I bring up this video not due to its quality – it is, to be frank, drenched in a lot of pro-capitalist or capitalist-complicit rhetoric – but because randomly stumbling across this video years ago was my first proper introduction to the concept of net neutrality. Perhaps this makes a degree of sense given that the video itself is designed to be an introduction to the concept. But precisely because it is an introduction, I find the video’s gestures towards infrastructure to be informative.

    As Starosielski notes, lags or disruptions while using the internet always point to issues of infrastructure. She writes, “The aesthetics of lag represent one way in which media consumers come into contact with infrastructure, though this encounter tells them little about what infrastructures they are traversing or where their signals extend” (Starosielski 62). Rather than foregrounding infrastructure in his video, Green takes it for granted. The word is only mentioned once when Green assumes the persona of a cable company executive arguing that Netflix should have to pay more to maintain optimal service for its customers: “Netflix is responsible for over 30% of the bandwidth use in the US. Why should all of our customers – regardless of whether they use Netflix – be required to pay for the massive infrastructure upgrades to provide that service?” (1:12-1:24). Within this video’s imagined debate between an internet user and a cable company executive, infrastructure matters only in so far as it directly impacts either party’s wallet. There is no consideration for the complexity of infrastructure construction and maintenance. The implication is that the cable company could easily build additional infrastructure to support the needs of Netflix and its users, the question is simply who should be held financially responsible.

    Within the context of this video, the very word “infrastructure” becomes another black box. This recalls Miriam Posner’s essay, “Breakpoints and Black Boxes: Information in Global Supply Chains” where she argues that the global supply chain is constantly tenuous, but consumers only notice this when multiple points of failure compound on each other. She notes of the supply chain’s collapse in 2020 due to COVID, “[S]ince no one really knew what had happened all the way down the chain, they could not predict how long it would take to self-heal” (25). Corporations and consumers thought of the infrastructure of the supply chain much as Green thinks of the infrastructure of the internet; its materiality is rendered as being inconsequential. Thus, I find Green’s video fascinating not because it is exceptional but because it is but one of countless examples that demonstrate how the mindset described in the quote from Posner was initially fostered – by assuming that “infrastructure” is a singular, stable idea rather than a vast, fractious, and often highly unstable network.