The Internet is infrastructure. This should be plain, but it's not. And the fact that it's not is itself a problem for everybody with a stake in the Net and its future — a population that rounds to everybody.
If you ask any ten people to tell you what the Internet is, you'll get ten different answers. That won't happen if you ask the same ten people what the road system is. Or the water system. Or the electric system. Or the subway and bus system. Or the phone or cable TV system. Yet civilization's dependence on the Net is coming to rival all but the last two of those, which are becoming encompassed by it.
Ask Google what "The Internet is", and the first ten answers are these (or were, on 28 September 2008):
It doesn't help that the word infrastructure is hardly much older than the Net itself. It appears in no titles among the seven hundred thousand volumes in the Boston Athenaeum — a library packed with books on architecture, history and public works. In a keyword search of the Athenaeum's catalog, infrastructure shows up in just two books, both published since the turn of the millennium.
Harvard's vast HOLLIS Catalog, which spans most of the university's 15.8 million volumes — the largest such system in the world — yields just twenty results in a search for "infrastructure" among titles. The earliest was published in 1976. Four were published in the 1980s, sixteen in the 1990s, and three from 2000 onward.
Merriam-Webster Online dates infrastructure from 1927, and offers these definitions:
1: the underlying foundation or basic framework (as of a system or organization)
2: the permanent installations required for military purposes
3: the system of public works of a country, state, or region ; also : the resources (as personnel, buildings, or equipment) required for an activity
Dictionary.com unpacks several sources of definitions for infrastructure, starting with the Random House Unabridged Dictionary (2006), and following with the American Heritage Dictionary. The former offers the same three definitions as Merriam-Webster (with slightly different wording) and dates the word from 1925-1930. The latter subtracts the military definition, but adds this usage note: "The term infrastructure has been used since 1927 to refer collectively to the roads, bridges, rail lines, and similar public works that are required for an industrial economy, or a portion of it, to function. The term also has had specific application to the permanent military installations necessary for the defense of a country. Perhaps because of the word's technical sound, people now use infrastructure to refer to any substructure or underlying system. Big corporations are said to have their own financial infrastructure of smaller businesses, for example, and political organizations to have their infrastructure of groups, committees, and admirers. The latter sense may have originated during the Vietnam War in the use of the word by military intelligence officers, whose task it was to delineate the structure of the enemy's shadowy organizations."
Stephen Lewis follows this trail in The Etymology of Infrastructure and the Infrastructure of the Internet. There he says "Infrastructure indeed entered the English language as a loan word from French, in which it had been a railroad engineering term. A 1927 edition of the Oxford mentioned the word in the context of '... the tunnels, bridges, culverts, and 'infrastructure work' of the French railroads.' After World War II, 'infrastructure' reemerged as in-house jargon within NATO, this time referring to fixed installations necessary for the operations of armed forces and to capital investments considered necessary to secure the security of Europe."
From there, Lewis continues, infrastructure "spilled into the contexts of urban management and regional and national development, and into the private sector — but with some boundaries." In the early 1970s, infrastructure "was used to refer to those massive capital investments (water, subways, roads, bridges, tunnels, schools, hospitals, etc.) necessary to city's economy and the lives of its inhabitants and businesses enterprises but too massive and too critical to be conceived, implemented, and run at a profit or to be trusted to the private sector."
From Lewis' own work in Europe and Asia in in the 1970s and early 1980s, he recalls that "in the world of oil refining, petrochemicals, and 'process' plants, 'infrastructure' referred to those social or governmental capital investments — roads, sewerage, water sources, electrical power, and other 'utilities' — that were necessary for manufacturing but the provision of which did not fall within the scope of a single project, the 'battery limits' of an industrial facility, or the commercial 'feedstocks' that were are the raw materials for industrial processes." In other words, infrastructure then still referred primarily to the public foundations on which private enterprise could build.
After that the word became so widely used in both public and private sectors that its meaning became much more inclusive and vague. Its public form, Lewis notes, infrastructure became "an aspect of economic life and social cohesion known more by its collapse and abandonment and raffling off to the private sector than by its implementation, well-functioning, and expansion."
In the "Infrastructure and Development" chapter of Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics 2005: Lessons of Experience, Remy Prud'homme also notes the recent provenance of infrastructure (notably its absence from dictionaries and the parlance of economists and public policy wonks). Then he adds, "This contrasts with the formidable success of the word in the 1980s and 1990s, when it invaded United Nations institutions, World Bank organizational charts, academic journals and daily newspapers. The process has clearly been inflationary. The meaning of the word has been extended so much that it no longer means much." Then, to restore meaning, he uses the word "to describe objects such as the ones listed above, which have in common all or most of the following attributes."
Before listing those attributes, he matches services (transportation; water supply, disposal and irrigation; garbage disposal, district heating, telecommunication and power) with the physical things — the infrastructure — they require. These include roads, bridges, tunnels, rail tracks, harbors, dams, reservoirs, pipes, treatment plants, sewers, water treatment plants, canals, dumps, incinerators, compost units, plants, telephone lines and exchanges, power plants, transmission and distribution lines.
"What matters," he says, "is the service, much more than the infrastructure used or needed to produce it." Therefore, he adds, "Policies should focus on the end (service provision), not the means (infrastructure endowment)." Infrastructure itself only becomes an issue, he notes, when services are capital intensive.
Such is the case with Internet service. Today most of us are provisioned Internet service by carriers — telephone and cable television companies — whose businesses were host to what Lewis calls the "ad hoc" deployment of the Net's protocols, which used carriers' private infrastructure as if it were far more public than it was. Thus the Internet spread both in spite as well as because of those businesses. The Net is unique as infrastructure because it is inherently self-provisioned, taking advantage of any available physical or wireless path, without regard for the sunk or future capital expenses laid out by its carriers.
For individuals, Bob Frankston points out, the Net's model is home networking writ large. "Connectivity is about relationships, while communications is what we do with those relationships. The power of today's Internet comes from letting us focus on the relations and our ability to communicate rather than the twisting passages through telecom's maze of copper, fiber and radios. The networks in our homes are a good example. You 'just' print without worry about negotiating for the printing provider."
David Isenberg calls the Net "stupid" because its only job is connecting human and machine intelligence at its end points. Isenberg's thesis rests on the end-to-end principle embodied in the Net's Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). Craig Burton combines "stupid" with end-to-end through the metaphor of a hollow sphere built entirely of ends, all facing each other across a the three-dimensional zero between them: "The distance between any two points is functionally zero, and not just because they can see each other, but because nothing interferes with operation between any two points." The result, Kevin Barron says, is a "giant brain" comprised of the collected intelligence of every connected individual, document and back-end service. In The Big Switch, Nicholas Carr says Amazon's and Google's back-end Web services are themselves utilities: "Cheap, utility-supplied computing will ultimately change society as profoundly as cheap electricity did."
But not all society at once, and not everywhere in the world. Deployment of the infrastructure required before the Net becomes a true "giant zero", or makes Big Switch benefits available to everybody, is bound to be what Prud'homme calls "lumpy". It doesn't hapen evenly. Or at all, unless the investment is justified. Even if we subtract out the antique business models and billing practices of carriers kept alive by persistent telephony and television demand, and make carriage of the Net's packets as "stupid" as possible, the capital outlays required are enormous, especially as demand to connect and share data grows at an exponential pace. Whether the Net is provisioned as a grace of private enterprise or public largesse, the capital outlays must be justified and rationalized. This is hard to do when the Net itself remains ad hoc at its core, and when innovation is highly permitted at the ends while it remains highly regulated inside the "zero." All due respect to the need for keeping the Net "stupid," but should carriers be forced to move their own innovation imperatives off the table? That's what they hear in demands for "net neutrality" legislation. Can we reconcile the Net's end-to-end values with the need for carriers to innovate, and to maximize their capacity to pay off capital investments on behalf of the Net? The answer is yes, but not until we fully understand what the Net is, and how the meaning of infrastructure changes once it supports "spaces" and "environments" that are not physical.
In a 1999 interview Craig Burton said, "There's a word I like for what's going on here: terraform. It's the verb for creating a world. That's what we're making here: a new world. Now the question is, what are we going to do to cause planetary existence? How can we terraform this new world in a way that works for the world and not just ourselves?"
Nine years later we are still under-equipped to meet this challenge, simply because both the Net and infrastructure remain poorly understood and defined — even as both are widely discussed and relied upon.
The need for this understanding could not be higher. Data accumulation at the Net's ends is rising exponentially while the ability to share it across the Net's many paths inches up incrementally, and unevenly. The world economy meanwhile threatens to slide from recession into depression, meaning that capital for expanding the Net's supportive capacity — its physical infrastructure — may decrease or go away.
Billions or trillions of dollars in productivity, plus the expansion of other civilized graces, are staked on better understanding of the Net and Infrastructure. Increasing that understanding requires fresh and determined scholarship inside the academy and outside the immediate interests of any one interest group. Ten years from now there should be dozens, or hundreds, of books in the HOLLIS catalog, each providing guidance to both the public and private sectors, as they make policy, write (or recind) laws, and develop businesses that support and expand the good done by the Net for the world.