Engineering Cultures and Internet Infrastructure Politics. With Corinne Cath-Speth

My guest today is Dr Corinne Cath-Speth. Corinne is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on Internet infrastructure politics, engineering cultures, and technology policy and governance.

Corinne has recently completed their PhD at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), which was titled, Changing Minds & Machines. It was an ethnographic study of internet governance, the culture(s) and politics of internet infrastructure, standardization and civil society. 

Drawing on their research, Corinne gave a talk as part of an event series hosted by the Oxford Internet Institute which explored the opaque companies and technologists who exercise significant but rarely questioned power over the Internet. As Corinne said during their talk, this mostly unknown aspect of the Internet is “as important as platform accountability".

I invited Corinne onto the show to tell us more.

Using the Fastly incident in June, Corinne explains who and what these largely invisible, powerful Internet infrastructure companies are and how an outage can have a “large impact on the entirety of our online ecosystem”. The incident shows “how power is enacted through the functioning and maintenance of Internet infrastructure design.” Corinne goes on to say that  “just because the Internet infrastructure is largely invisible to users doesn't mean that it's apolitical [in the case of Cloudflare and 8chan in particular] and it doesn't mean that these companies can claim neutrality”.

Corinne talks about their PhD dissertation and says, “I was really interested in understanding how the engineering cultures of infrastructure organizations influence what but also whose values end up steering technical discussions”. Their fieldwork was conducted in an organization called the Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF). (Corinne brilliantly summarised their PhD in a series of tweets.)

Corinne explains what drew them to research this particular topic and notes that “it is so important to get at the personal drivers of our research and being really upfront and explicit about how those are key part of our research practice and the kind of decisions that we end up making.”

Corinne shares why they believe cultural anthropology is relevant “to questions of Internet infrastructure of politics and power”, saying “I believe that anthropology really can provide new, novel perspectives on current Internet infrastructure dilemmas, including those related to the connections between cultures and code.”

While there’s rightly concern about platform accountability or the power of tech companies, what many people don’t realise is that companies like Meta and Amazon are also infrastructure companies. We need to ask ourselves, says Corinne, “how comfortable we are with the fact that a handful of companies are starting to influence huge parts of the entire Internet”. 

Corinne “really wants to encourage people” to study aspects of the Internet “because the last thing we want” is for a small number of companies to have “a say over many parts of our lives….And us not understanding how it happened”.

Lastly, Corinne says, “what we need is a balanced and well-resourced counter-power to the influence of corporate actors that are steering the future of the Internet”.

Further reading
Corinne has kindly supplied a list of resources and reading that they mentioned in the podcast.

Transcript

Dawn Walter: [00:00:04]

Today we are delighted to be talking to Dr Corinne Cath-Speth. Corinne is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on Internet infrastructure politics, engineering cultures, and technology policy and governance.

Corinne has recently completed their PhD at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), which was titled, Changing Minds & Machines. It was an ethnographic study of Internet governance, the culture(s) and politics of Internet infrastructure, standardization and civil society. 

Drawing on their research, Corinne gave a talk as part of an event series hosted by the Oxford Internet Institute which explored the opaque companies and technologists who exercise significant but rarely questioned power over the Internet. As Corinne said during their talk, this mostly unknown aspect of the Internet is “as important as platform accountability". I’ve invited Corinne onto the show to tell us more.

Welcome Corinne. Thank you for joining us. How are you today? 

Corinne Cath-Speth: [00:01:55]

I'm good. Thanks so much for having me on. This is so exciting, 

Dawn Walter: [00:01:58]

Pleasure to have you. Congratulations on finishing your PhD, fantastic. As I explained in the podcast introduction, you gave a talk in June hosted by the Oxford Internet Institute, which drew on your PhD research about the growing role of Internet infrastructure and Internet governance, and it's a largely hidden part of the internet. And it was briefly made visible when Fastly “broke the internet” on June 8th, so I wanted to know: Who and what are these powerful actors? Why are they powerful? And why is this issue as important as platform accountability, as you said in your talk?

Corinne Cath-Speth: [00:02:37]

Well, I wanted to start off by thanking you again, for having me on to talk about the politics of Internet infrastructure. I think there are multiple parts to your question and each of which deserves a bit of attention in and of its own. So if it's okay, I'll try and pull apart your question into its various parts and then answer each separately, starting with question of who these powerful Internet infrastructure actors are and how they define so much of our online lives. One of the things that I noticed, even at the beginning of my PhD, is that a lot of the literature in, in social sciences tends to, as well as the debate at the moment, tends to focus on power in the context of the most visible aspects of the Internet, right? So, primarily it's consumer-facing services or applications like social media platforms. 

But for all of these services to be able to function, there is a range of both individuals and organizations that build the underlying infrastructure to support it and this infrastructure, just to make it a bit more concrete, is anything from physical hardware so your computer but also the cables through which bits run to protocol design, so the the kind of technologies that enable different companies and their networks to talk to each other and exchange information. 

And that is what much of my PhD is focused on. And in my research, I talk about these powerful companies as Internet infrastructure actors. So, who are these who are these organizations and what is Internet infrastructure? So, for me, infrastructure is really about those aspects of the Internet that what Plantin and his collaborators call reliable, transparent and widely shared invisible to use it when it breaks down. And the reason why I like this particular definition is because it doesn't limit Internet infrastructure to a set number of technologies. Like, it really takes an expansive approach which enables me to include what, what Christian Sandvig is called the emergent essential of the Internet and include its pipes, its protocols, it's politics, but also the people that make the Internet tick. 

And to make, you know, this infrastructure a bit more concrete, I'll try and outline a little bit how it features in our lives. So for instance, if you or I start the weekend, it's been a long week, what we want to do on a Friday afternoon is just watch a nice movie on one of the streaming platforms that we have a plan with. 

So the how we can do that is because a large number of mostly unknown companies and organizations work together. So, for instance, we have companies like Netflix or HBO, you know, these are really familiar names, that produce the kind of content that we want to watch, and they make it available on their platforms. And this content then moves from their computers from their servers to our consumer devices, so, our laptops, our phones, whatever, across a network that is run by, for instance, telecom providers like British Telecom, Verisign, or Turkish Telecom, depending on where you are. 

And what we see is that on the journey from the server, so the computer of the company to our devices, the content is routed by companies like Cisco or Huawei or alternatively, content can be stored in delivered via what is called a Content Delivery Network, or CDN, which is run by companies like Cloudflare or Akamai. And they ensure that the content is physically close to where we are so you get really fast loading times. 

Now, I am primarily interested in these sort of latter organizations and the technologies that they build to ensure that information can be transported across different networks to our consumer devices, just to get a sense of, you know, who is involved in this. And now that I've given a bit of an overview of the who of Internet infrastructure, I want to move to what makes some of these companies so incredibly powerful and how that power essentially manifests in our daily lives. 

And to do that I want to draw from the example that you alluded to in your introduction of my work, namely a technical error caused by Internet infrastructure company, Fastly, on June 8th of this year, which essentially led to a large number of websites with very big traffic footprints, not being available for a couple of hours. 

And on Tuesday 8th, it was an interesting coincidence, I got a call from my brother who told me that my age cohort could sign up for the Covid vaccinations in the Netherlands, where I'm originally from. And at the time in June, I was eight months pregnant and have been waiting to get my vaccination as I was, as you can imagine, worried about catching the virus, but when I rushed to the government's online portal to sign up, it showed a 503 status unavailable code and I'm sure we've all come across these these codes, there are many. 503 usually indicates that the server is unable to handle the request. So in this case, the server was unable to load the website for me due to a temporary overloading or maintenance issues. So essentially what happened is that the government was unable to give me my appointment information that I needed due to a breakdown in the communication between the government's website and the server that actually store the website content. 

And what we know is that there are many reasons why these kind of communication breakdowns happen between websites and servers, but the one that specifically caused me not to be able to access the government portal that day was interesting to me, especially from a research perspective, because it essentially originated from a single company and had a very large impact on the entirety of our online ecosystem, beyond the website that I was trying to access, PayPal, the New York Times, CNN, and BBC’s websites, were all unavailable for quite a bit of time. 

And what we see is that the company that caused this well, infraction, essentially in the accessibility of online content was called Fastly. Fastly is not a household name for most people who use the Internet on a daily basis. It is one of a handful of companies that provide what is called Content delivery Network or CDN’s. And it is in these CDN’s that the power, the question of power of infrastructure really comes in. And to understand what happened in June, it is important that we talk a little bit about, you know, how the Internet works and the nuts and bolts below the applications that we all use on a daily basis. 

Taking a couple of steps back, the Internet was originally built to be sort of a peer-to-peer network, enabling each user to essentially ask for content and access content on a peer’s computer and that peer computer acts as a server hosting their particular content. But what we've seen is, you know, both because of the size of the world and because of the physical limits of cables that make up the Internet, that content that is requested on a hosting server that is far away will take much longer to load. 

And that is annoying for obvious reasons because we are not used anymore to waiting for information to come. We want it to just, snap, be there. So one way around having to wait for content to come is to make sure that it's stored on a computer that is near you, so it essentially takes less time to fetch it from that computer to yours. This means content loads much faster, which is both what we as consumers expect, but also what will companies profit from. 

And this is where companies like Fastly but also Cloudflare, Akamai, and Amazon Web Services as well as other cloud companies, play really big role because they provide what is called a Content Delivery Network. And essentially, what that means is that companies like Fastly provides other organizations, like the BBC, or the Dutch government, with servers or clouds that will essentially host their content close to where it's most likely to be requested. And what we see is that most big companies, many organizations, including government, use the CDN services, but at the same time, the CDN market is relatively small. There's only a handful of players. 

Which means that when one of those players has an issue, like we saw in June, that a substantial part of its clients and their websites are going to be affected and Fastly is actually only the fifth biggest of these players. It only has I think around 89 or 90 percent because 89 or 90 percent of the market is in the hands of cloud for Amazon and Akamai. And so, what this whole kerfuffle with Fastly shows are clear traces of how power is enacted through the functioning and maintenance of Internet infrastructure design. 

 Corinne Cath-Speth: [00:12:00]

These decisions by these companies or mistakes, as was the case with Fastly, essentially touch on who can control what aspect of the internet. And in this sense they have power of over how we experience it. And so taking this back to the case study of Fastly, we essentially see that a single decision or mistake can echo across the Internet and this in turn raises really hard questions around, who are these actors, these infrastructure actors? How do they make decisions? And what does accountability for their infrastructural power look like? That's sort of where my PhD research comes in. 

And then there's one last question or one, I think, the last part of your question that I wanted to touch on, which is why this issue of infrastructure power is as important as platform governance, which obviously is a real key topic of study at the moment. For me, at least, part of the reason why this topic is so important is because infrastructure actors can explicitly or inadvertently directly influence what content and information is available to us online in ways similar to platforms. And there are many, sort of recent examples that we can go into that really underline that where it's not about the companies making a mistake, but where they actually, actively decide to deny services to certain clients. 

I mean, we've seen that with Cloudflare that banned 8chan, which is a bulletin board, after this bulletin board was used to encourage a mass shooter in the US. We've seen GoDaddy, which is a web hosting company, terminate its contract with an anti-abortion website more recently. And what makes these two examples particularly interesting is that other than, or different from, the Fastly case study, which revolves around a technical flaw, sometimes these infrastructure providers make really active political decisions about what content should be available online and sometimes we collectively can get behind the politics of their decisions. But the ease with which they can actually preside over online content should, you know, nonetheless be somewhat worrying. Especially because these companies tend not to be subject to the same kind of scrutiny that social media platforms are.

 Dawn Walter: [00:14:21]

What I find really interesting about all of this is until the Fastly thing happened I had actually had no idea about all this stuff that goes on underneath and I think a lot of people don't. So I think this is why this is really an important issue and also, because you touch later on in your PhD about, there's lots of things that I wanted, they're really relevant to the summit. But so, in your article particularly, I think is a really good example of how Cloudflare approaches these kinds of decisions, that they say it's not political and everything, you know, how hate speech reveals the invisible politics of the Internet infrastructure. So that they say that they're not a public utility, sorry, they say they are a public utility provider, they are a mere conduit. So, can you just speak to that a little bit and explain why they aren't? 

 Corinne Cath-Speth: [00:15:11]

So, so your question, speaks specifically to an article that Suzanne van Geuns and I wrote for the Brookings Institute. And I think the full title of it is “How hate speech reveals the invisible politics of Internet infrastructure”, and Suzanne, my co-author, is a PhD researcher at the University of Toronto who does really interesting work in this area as well. And essentially the argument that we make throughout is we draw from a case study that I mentioned earlier where Cloudflare, which is another Content Delivery Network company, essentially decided to cancel their contract with a bulletin board called 8chan after it was used to encourage a shooter, the shooter of the El Paso attacks, and and cloud servers CEO essentially said, like we can't, we won't stand for this, we don't want to provide our services to a website that sort of encourages those kind of awful, awful attacks. 

And the interesting thing about this is that it took the company some time to arrive at that conclusion. So initially they said no we will keep them on as a client, it's not necessarily our responsibility. And specifically, they said, you know, we feel uncomfortable about playing the role of content arbiter and don't plan to exercise this role often. And this is where it gets interesting because what we see is that these kind of infrastructure companies tend to think of themselves and speak about themselves as neutral providers of infrastructure. 

And this is something that Suzanne and I wanted to push back on because what that argument implies is that infrastructure companies can't be held accountable for what passes through their servers because it's because their work is largely invisible. And what we see is when these kind of Internet companies claim to be neutral conduits are essentially also abdicating responsibility for the kind of, in this particular case, for the online hate that was present on a website that they supported. 

But, you know, just because the Internet infrastructure is largely invisible to users doesn't mean that it's apolitical and it doesn't mean that these companies can claim neutrality. Rather we should try and think about this companies in a different way. And the metaphor that I try to use is, you know, a doctor isn’t only a doctor only on the day that their patients die, they’re also a doctor on the day that their patients live. And what companies like Cloudflare tend to say is, like, we are not political actors because by and large we don't make decisions about what content is available. But every day that they decide to keep particular content online as opposed to, you know, rescinding their services and pulling it offline is day that they're also making political decisions. 

 Dawn Walter: [00:18:23]

I do wonder sometimes if people understand what they, what is meant by politics because people think about politics as being politics in government.

 Corinne Cath-Speth: [00:18:31]

Yes. I mean, this particular differentiation is one of the things that I go into in depth in in my PhD. Because what I show is that the way in which technical actors understand politics is often incredibly narrow. So, when you and I, anthropologists of technology, speak about politics, it's a much more broader spectrum of decisions that have particular social outcomes, that have particular impacts, that talk about power. Whereas for a lot of the engineers that I have spoken to genuinely politics is a bad word because they tend to associate it with government intervention. And they in certain cases have a valid point that government intervention in their technical work does not always lead to what they perceive to be the best technical outcomes. 

So for them essentially politics is a bad word and this leads to a lot of sort of confusion where if you have an engineer speaking to, well, I mean social scientist like myself or someone who is a human rights activist and wants to have a conversation with a technologist about the particular political impact of the design that they're building, then you just get this sort of misunderstanding. And in order to sort of make sure that there is greater recognition of the fact that, you know, politics is inherent to the kind of infrastructure decisions that these companies make, the starting point needs to be a conversation, not just about, you know, technology and design and the potential impact it has on shaping this society, but also about, you know, what we mean by politics, and can we come to an agreement on that, such that we can subsequently try to figure out, like, what kind of a mediating role does the technology that you're building play in this.

Dawn Walter: [00:20:27]

Exactly. And that's something you touched on your PhD. Let's talk about that now. So I'd love you to briefly summarize your PhD thesis, which was entitled Changing Minds and Machines, for our listeners.

Corinne Cath-Speth: [00:20:39]

So, given what I've already mentioned about the importance of Internet infrastructure, for my PhD research I was really interested in understanding how the engineering cultures of infrastructure organizations influence what but also whose values end up steering technical discussions. It comes as no surprise to anyone studying anthropology that this is what I'm interested in. And within that sort of larger debate I was especially interested in the ability of civil society, in particular the professionals working for human rights and civil liberties organizations, to get their voices and concerns included in the development of the Internet's technical infrastructure. 

Now, these infrastructure companies are notoriously hard to get access to, I mean, as with platform governance companies but there are some ways around that. And so my fieldwork took place in an organization called the Internet Engineering Taskforce, or IETF. And the IETF is an open standards body that brings together some of some of the biggest names in tech. So Google, Apple, Facebook, Huawei, they all go there to collectively develop open standards that allow the Internet to work. And it was in the Internet Engineering Taskforce that these civil society representatives, interested in bringing a public interest perspective to Internet infrastructure, worked alongside the engineers of these various companies and other participants. 

And so what they did is they ran their own research group and they also participated in the technical working groups of the Internet Engineering Taskforce, and my PhD research specifically asks what role IETF culture plays in its structural politics. And to answer that question, I essentially conducted an ethnographic case study of civil society working in the IETF and to do that I did three years of ethnographic fieldwork, between 2017 and 2020, archival work, as well as over 60 interviews. And necessarily part of that field work was online because it coincided with the pandemic which meant that the IETF, which usually holds three or four meetings per year in person of a week, now, all of that work moved online. 

That being said, a large part of my fieldwork already had a really distinct online component because a lot of the work of the Internet Engineering Taskforce happens through mailing lists. And what I essentially try to show in my PhD is how the conservative protocol politics and a pretty narrow network imaginaries that are dominant in the IETF shape the overall development of the internet. And what I also show is that the many of the IETF’s there is this notion of what I call “engineered innocence” in the IETF which encourages its technologists to primarily intervene in human rights matters when those aligned with their culturally-situated commitments. 

So, for instance, they are more inclined to worry about government surveillance than corporate surveillance, they are more worried about privacy than they are about anti-discrimination, even though these are both human rights that are relevant in the context of the Internet. And what I show my empirical chapters is I focus on three interrelated aspect of the IETF. So its organizational culture, its exclusionary working practices and how these affect the reception of human rights values, and how the IEFT’s imaginaries shape engineers’ narrow understanding of responsibility for the technology that they choose to create, to sort of quote their own words back at them. 

What I hope is that my work speaks to a number of both academic debates as well as policy debates. In terms of the academic literature I'm really trying to sort of draw together disparate conversations that are happening in the field of Internet governance and the anthropology of technology and technical communities. And specifically what I try to show is that, you know, the IETF’s functioning with organizations functioning might look like it's procedurally open because it has successful meetings, because it has open mailing lists, but it's particularly working practices, which are rooted in confrontation, in abrasiveness, actually make it pretty, culturally closed off. And I also try to show that the engineers, the technologists, tend to see the claims and the goals of the human rights advocates as imposing requirements on their work, that actually contravene their culturally-specific view of non-prescriptiveness.

So they tend to think like, if we start thinking about and starting imposing all of these human rights outcomes, that is actually bad for the Internet and so we shouldn't be doing it. So the concerns of the human rights advocates are dismissed, not necessarily because they're irrelevant or technically impossible but because they don't match the kind of Internet that many of the engineers tend to think of as being a good Internet.

Dawn Walter:

Are there issues of neutrality in there as well, you know, the Internet is neutral, machines are neutral, all that sort of thing.

Corinne Cath-Speth:

There's a lot of neutrality there and I think one of the messages that I try to convey is that this sort of cultural notion of neutrality also provides a hurdle to civil society individuals who are interested in participating. And at the same time I show that neutrality to certain extent is a front. I've spoken to many engineers, who will, I mean, who say, who said to me, yes, publicly we talk about our work as apolitical, we talk about our work as neutral, not because we necessarily believe that to be the case, but because if we don't, we are afraid that we might invite government scrutiny or we might invite outside intervention, or we might invite regulation and we don't want that because we think things work just fine the way they do. 

And so one of the messages that my research to a certain extent presents to civil society is also about the importance of doing ethnographic work on these kind of organizations because what I show is that the experience of the human rights advocates in this particular infrastructure organization shows that civil society will also have to deal with these kind of cultural barriers. And sometimes civil society actually risks compromising on its own goals, aims, and missions when they encounter different cultural views on technology because what they, what ends up happening is that the idea of cultural frames around human rights and what good infrastructure is can overwhelm and crowd out civil society. And this is possible in part because because of, and not in spite of the fact, that they have a seat at the table of the Internet Engineering Taskforce.

 Dawn Walter: [00:28:10]

So my next question is, is this going to be a book one day?

Corinne Cath-Speth: [00:28:16]

I would love for it to be. I am also at this point still recovering from having finished the PhD and so at this stage where I'm not quite ready to put in the thinking and the energy that is needed to revise it. But it is definitely one of the things on my to-do list for 2022. 

Dawn Walter: [00:28:40]

Fantastic. That's good. That's great to hear. So I'm really curious what drew you to research this particular topic. So you worked as a program officer for the “Digital Team” of human rights NGO ARTICLE 19, and as policy advisor for the US House of Representatives in Washington D.C. So, what was the spark during your academic career or your work that made you want to research this topic for your PhD?

Corinne Cath-Speth: [00:29:04]

I mean, I really, I mean I appreciate all of your questions, but this one in particular and I think especially as it is so important to get at the personal drivers of of our research and being really upfront and explicit about how those are key part of our research practice and the kind of decisions that we end up making. And I mean, as is often the case with ethnographic work, my interest in human rights advocacy in Internet infrastructure, in particular, you know, came from from a deep personal curiosity as well as my own experience. 

And to essentially answer this question about what exactly started my interest in Internet infrastructure, I have to go back almost 10 years during my bachelor, my master's degree in anthropology at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands, I was really interested in how activists, human rights activists, human rights defenders, use social media to push back against state pressure and injustice, broadly speaking. And keep in mind that this is between 2008 and 2012. And this was very much a time that many still saw the Internet as this beacon of freedom and a key technology in toppling the regimes that fell during the Arab Spring, and I was very sceptical of the potential of the Internet and its ability to live up to all these big promises that, you know, that were made in terms of its ability to fundamentally upset power relations in society.

And part of the reason why I was so sceptical was because I'd spent several years living in Brazil, my father's family is from that country, and I've worked with a number of organizations that supported activists from the favela, so the unregulated settlements, and in my experience working with them, I mean it became clear that yes to a certain extent, the Internet as a communications network that anyone could just, you know, plug into, could use, did provide new avenues for dissent but very rarely in a way that actually fundamentally upended the power imbalances that you know called for that kind of dissent to be necessary in the first place. 

And after my initial research focused on the use of Internet by activists, I actually became part of a group of individuals interested in seeing how Internet infrastructure could be designed such that it become more sensitive to concerns other than technical and corporate drivers. And as you mentioned, I spent some time working for civil society organization, ARTICLE 19, and there I was part of a team that focused on bringing a human-rights agenda to the technical development of the Internet and I essentially built out my PhD research starting from the questions that work raised for me. 

 Dawn Walter: [00:32:04]

So I want to go next, to explore, you touched on it a little bit, why do you feel that anthropology,  particularly for the non-anthropologists who are listening to this, is the best discipline or lens through which do your PhD research. 

 Corinne Cath-Speth: [00:32:18]

So I think the best way to explain the relevance of cultural anthropology to questions of Internet infrastructure of politics and power is by drawing from an anecdote. In 2016 I presented findings from my Master thesis at the meeting of the Réseaux IP Européens or RIPE Forum, which is a group of essentially network operators, Internet network operators, and many of them also participate in the Internet Engineering Taskforce. 

And what I did essentially in this presentation is argue that you know, they as technologists have a particular responsibility to consider the impact of their technical decisions on society. Now this might seem like an incredibly obvious thing to ask of technologists, but in this particular technical community such a political approach to technical work is actually incredibly contentious. And so at the time Professor Jan Aart Scholte, who is a global governance scholar, who also researches, who also does research on Internet governance, was in the room when he watched my presentation. 

And after the presentation, we met and exchanged notes, and he asked me some follow-up questions and he actually told me that the technologist sitting next to him during my presentation said the following about my research. This technologist said, “Ah, yes, young female anthropologist pushes all the wrong buttons”, and for me that quote has stayed with me throughout the past six years to the point where it became the title of my Method chapter because it really demonstrates the importance of anthropology to the study of Internet infrastructure. First this particular comment showed that the community involved in the technical governance of the Internet has, you know, very clear, if not always visible, but pretty conservative norms about who belongs. 

Secondly, it shows that, you know, there are inherent politics included in the design of the Internet that are really difficult to see in any other way but by participating. And it also suggests that by revealing the social implications of Internet protocols, or Internet infrastructure and their inherent politics, I was pushing on the buttons of this community, and it's only by doing that that you can really sort of make clear what the existing norms are, and interrogate those, and question taken-for-granted knowledge and it is anthropology that, you know, uniquely sort of gives us the method to do that with. And in that sense, I believe that anthropology really can provide new novel perspectives on current Internet infrastructure dilemmas, including those related to the connections between cultures and code.

 Dawn Walter: [00:35:18]

So I was going to ask you this question a bit later but I think it ties in quite nicely. So do you feel quite strongly that other anthropologists, or other social scientists, should be studying the Internet infrastructure and the Internet governance, that it shouldn't just be…I guess my question also is, are you the only anthropologist studying this?

Corinne Cath-Speth: [00:35:39]

No, certainly not. I mean this is one of the things that I was going to bring up. There luckily are many anthropologists who are considering issues of Internet infrastructure, or I mean social scientists somewhat more broadly construed but who use ethnographic methods. Professor Ashwin Matthew is a good example, Professor Laura DeNardis, Professor Seda Gürses. 

Luckily a lot of very smart folks are doing this kind of work and I think, you know, for those individuals who aren't familiar with the field, I think one of the things to point out is that, you know, if you're only, or let me rephrase that, if you are interested in platform governance, if you are interested in companies like Facebook or Google, you are also inherently interested in these questions of infrastructure, even if you might not see it that way. 

Because what we see is that, you know, Facebook is, or I mean Meta, or Facebook the app let’s say, is a social media company but Meta, the company, is also involved in laying Internet cables, physical hardware, right, and Amazon, which most of us tend to think of as a web shop, is one of the biggest cloud providers at the moment, that is their core business, not selling us stuff for the holidays, but making sure that other people have places where they can, you know, do their data science or where they can store their content. 

So, what we see is that these companies that we tend to think of as social media companies are also infrastructure companies, and that in and of itself raises a lot of really important questions around like how comfortable we are with the fact that you know, a handful of companies are starting to influence huge parts of the entire Internet, from it's sort of physical hardware all the way up to the apps that we tend to use on a daily basis.

Dawn Walter: [00:37:31]

Like you say there's so much that's visible and that we need to study the invisible a bit more, don't we, and make it visible.

Corinne Cath-Speth: [00:37:38]

Yes. Yes, especially because it also again, like, if you understand, if you, if you're a regulator and you want to think about Facebook, again as an example, and, you know, how they get called to different hearings across the world, I often miss the questions where they’re asking, Okay, great, you know, there's all of this concern around disinformation and misinformation around your platform. But what are you doing with these Internet cables? And what is your interest in developing this? And how concerned should we be about those? So taking an infrastructural perspective, I think, also widens the lens on the kind of concerns we should have about the power that these companies have across the board. 

Dawn Walter: [00:38:20]

What would you say to some people coming up behind you, younger anthropologists and other social scientists. And what would you say to them? Would you encourage them to study this, this topic? 

Corinne Cath-Speth: [00:38:31]

I mean. Yes, certainly and this is something that I have done with my my own students, and they've expressed their worries about but this is difficult, and it's technically complicated and it's a steep learning curve. And, you know, on the one hand, all of these things are true, but as is learning about platforms, because that also requires quite a bit of understanding of how algorithms work, and then, you know, how data is fed into that. So I think the question of technical challenge is one that all anthropologists studying any aspect of the Internet face and I think given the way in which we see certain industries develop. 

So companies of all colours are increasingly using and reliant upon, for instance, the Content Delivery Network services that I mentioned, but also clouds. And so this means that understanding what a cloud is, how it functions, which companies run them, and like what that means in terms of what kind of say they have over what happens in all sorts of industries is incredibly important. 

And I really want to encourage people to take on these questions because the last thing that we want and is that essentially to be sort of, that we’re snuck up on, that all of a sudden we look around, and all we see is these five big cloud companies, or these five big Content Delivery Networks having a say over many parts of our lives. And us not understanding how it happened and how to undo any potential problems that that might lead to. And to be able to get to a point where that is possible, we need more critical voices, you know, showing what happens in the background and asking the hard questions. 

And also knowing that, you know, sometimes these companies have have good answers, right? I'm not trying to necessarily paint them as the bad guys, but I do think, you know, that to have a good societal debate about the future that we’re collectively moving towards, making apparent what is happening is a key part of that.

 Dawn Walter: [00:40:32]

Like you say we need to be aware of what's going on. I think there's a lot of us, me included, don't know half of this stuff and we really need to because it's like, you know, it's important. I did wonder if there any reading that you'd recommend, people who wanted to, perhaps even just sort of really basic books about how this all stuff works and then kind of a bit further along perhaps some other scholars that you mentioned, perhaps some of their works as well. 

Corinne Cath-Speth: [00:41:01]

Oh, yeah, no completely. I mean that there are so many incredible folks doing work on this. So in terms of more accessible, not necessarily academic work, there is this great little book called How The Internet Really Works. It was published by a number of civil society folks, myself included, but Mallory Knodel, Ulrike Uhlig, and Niels ten Oever, and it's sort of almost like a comic book that explains how the Internet work. It's accessible for anyone who is like pretty new to the topic. 

Then the work of Ingrid Burrington is always really great. She writes, she's one of the people really push this debate from a perspective that makes it really accessible. There's this outlet called Protocol who do really excellent work, and then the Center for Democracy and Technology puts out a newsletter every month called I* Newsletter: Internet Governance & Standards Governance that sort of outlines, you know, the what happened this month in the area of Internet governance. 

And then from the perspective of more sort of academic work, essentially anything ever written by Professor Laura DeNardis, especially her book on Protocol Politics, I think is both incredibly rigorous and very, very accessible. 

As I mentioned, Professor Ashwin Matthew, Professor Seda Gürses at the University of Delft. I mean, if people feel so inclined, the introductory chapters of my PhD tend to also be relatively easy to read. The work of Professor Michael Veal. I mean, luckily, I could go on and on and on as a good people that that are there and I'm super happy to provide some sort of resources for you to put in the podcast description for people who want to read more.

Dawn Walter: [00:42:52]

Thank you so much. So what's next for you now, that you've completed your PhD?

Corinne Cath-Speth: [00:42:59]

So it's been quite a year, separate from the fact that we're still all collectively living with the reality of Covid-19. I became a parent this year for the first time and on the same day that I received the official confirmation from the university that I also became a doctor. So over the past months I've essentially focused on winding down from those combined experiences, but also interviewing for my next steps. So, things are still a bit in progress there. But what I can say at the moment is that starting in January, I will to do two things job-wise. I'm going to become the Director of Research at a US-based grant-maker that focuses on my area of interest. And in terms of research, I hope to continue doing work with Oxford Internet Institute, but also be working with Dr Joan Donovan and others at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard on issues of Internet infrastructure, and sort of that combined experience hopefully will allow me to keep one foot in research but also focus on making sure that the work of the civil society folks that I described in my research actually continues to have an impact going forward. 

Dawn Walter: [00:44:16]

Congratulations on your PhD and becoming a mother and that sounds fantastic position, Director of Research, fantastic. Before we go, is there anything you wanted to kind of leave us with any sort of final notes or thoughts?

Corinne Cath-Speth: [00:44:27]

Yeah. I mean, I think there's two things. I mean for starters, I want to express my gratitude to all of the people that, you know, were willing to talk to me for for my research. And in particularly during that process, I became part of a group called the Public Interest Technology Group, or PITG, which is a collective of public interest technologists and being part of that group has been really incredible for my research. And it also has given me like a really amazing avenue to sort of make sure that my findings actually speak back to the work of practitioners. 

I also definitely want to thank the Ford Foundation because they've been able to make my work possible over over the years. The other thing that I think I want to mention is that, you know, we already spoke about the need for more, from you, more researchers in this area. And I also want to speak about what is needed sort of beyond that. I mean, because we do need more researchers definitely, don't get me wrong. 

But I do think what we also need is a balanced and well-resourced counter-power to the influence of corporate actors that are steering the future of the Internet through their work on Internet infrastructure, and I think some of that sort of counter-power will be, will take the shape of critical research, but some of it will be through, you know, interventions of civil society and public interest technologists. And some of that will hopefully be through what I'll be doing next, namely supporting both the groups and that make that kind of those critical interventions. And so what I hope is that this whole field can be built in a way where the balance is struck in a way that Internet infrastructure is geared towards, you know, some sort of shared notion of public interest and not just fuelled by, you know, the corporate demands of the day. 

Dawn Walter: [00:46:21]

That's a great call to action, thank you very much, it’s a lovely note to end on and it was lovely talking today. I love your work. I think it's super super interesting because I meant and yeah, I definitely will, I loved your summary of your PhD on Twitter, so it really makes me want to read it properly.

Corinne Cath-Speth: [00:46:37]

I really appreciate it. And thank you so much again for having me on, it's always really fun to be able to talk about this work in a less academic setting and, you know, to a more diverse audience. 

 Dawn Walter: [00:46:48]

Fantastic. Thank you so much.