Dwayne Winseck

Internet Infrastructure and the Persistent Myth of U.S. Hegemony

Dwayne Winseck. In Information, Technology and Control in a Changing World: Understanding Power Structures in the 21st Century, edited by Blayne Haggart, Kathryn Henne, Natasha Tusikov, 93-120. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

According to many observers, economic globalisation and the liberalisation of telecoms/internet policy have remade the world in the image of the United States. The dominant role of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google has also led to charges of U.S. internet imperialism. This chapter, however, will argue that while these internet giants dominate some of the most popular internet services, the ownership and control of core elements of the internet infrastructure—submarine cables, IXPs, ASN, data centres, and so on—is tilting increasingly towards the EU and BRICS countries and the “rest-of-the-world,” complicating views of hegemonic U.S. control of the internet and of what Susan Strange calls the knowledge structure.

Keywords: Knowledge; Structural Power, Power

Contributor(s): Dwayne Winseck, Editor: Blayne Haggart, Editor: Kathryn Henne and Editor: Natasha Tusikov
Keywords: Knowledge, Structural Power, Power, Strange-Influenced Works, 2010's
Source and Medium: Book Chapter

Year of Publication: 2019

The Geopolitical Economy of the Global Internet Infrastructure

Winseck, Dwayne. Journal of Information Policy 7 (2017): 228-267.

According to many observers, economic globalization and the liberalization of telecoms/internet policy have remade the world in the image of the United States. The dominant roles of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have also led to charges of US internet imperialism. This article, however, argues that while these internet giants dominate some of the most popular internet services, the ownership and control of core elements of the internet infrastructure—submarine cables, internet exchange points, autonomous system numbers, datacenters, and so on—are tilting increasingly toward the EU and BRICS (i.e., Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) countries and the rest of the world, complicating views of hegemonic US control of the internet and what Susan Strange calls the knowledge structure.

Keywords: Structural Power, Power; Knowledge

Year of Publication: 2017