Time

The lesson should take around 20-30 minutes to complete, and consists of videos, texts and exercises. If you want to know more, there are links to recommended material.

About the lesson ‘Internet as infrastructure’

This lesson introduces you to how the internet functions as digital infrastructure. You will learn how the internet differs from earlier communication technologies, and how the transition to digital communication has created many opportunities, but also a number of challenges in society.

Learning outcomes

When you have completed the lesson, we expect that you:

have gained an understanding of the internet as digital infrastructure
know the key technological characteristics of the internet
are able to discuss and assess significant societal changes that have accompanied the transition to digital communication

Source

The lesson was produced by the University of Copenhagen as part of its learning resources for digital literacy, 2023.

Course directors:

Sofie Flensburg, tenure track assistant professor, Department of Communication
Camilla Moring, Associate Professor, Department of Communication

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The internet as infrastructure

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For English subtitles, please look for the CC icon in the lower right corner of the video and press English.
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What makes digital infrastructure different from analogue infrastructure?

The extensive digitalisation of Danish society seen over the past 30 years is based on the gradual development, expansion and improvement of the computer technologies and network systems that we know as the internet. As more Danes became connected to the internet and acquired more user-friendly computer equipment in the 1990s and 2000s, the number of websites grew, and public and private sector institutions increasingly took advantage of the new digital opportunities.

With the expansion of mobile broadband networks and the introduction of smartphones and other mobile devices, digital technologies have become more widespread. In other words: The internet has evolved into infrastructure comparable to the energy supply, transport network and other critical systems that fulfil key functions in Danish society and in people’s daily lives.

The internet has made possible and streamlined a wide range of activities, from the dissemination of content to financial transactions, shopping, public administration and much more.

This common, multi-functional communications infrastructure has three primary characteristics that differentiate it from earlier communications technologies:

Digital communication is based on information being broken down into data packets, which can be transported independently of their specific content.
The internet is a global network of networks that allows users to send and receive data from countless servers and computer networks around the world.
In principle, the internet allows all users to access and send content independently of earlier gatekeepers, such as different types of media companies and publishers.

While these new technological advances have significantly increased opportunities for individuals and institutions, they also created a wide range of challenges in society. The transition from postal mail to email, from traditional broadcasting to streaming, and from landline telephony to video conferencing has led to major changes in the power structures in society, and created dilemmas for the welfare state. For example, infrastructure has historically been organised as a public good, managed by public institutions (often monopolies), while the internet is driven primarily by global and commercial interests that government has limited insight into and influence over. The ability to constantly collect, monitor, process and resell user data raises fundamental ethical questions about our right to our own data, our privacy and how the algorithms affect our lives and decisions. The broader possibilities for accessing and spreading content – including controversial, harmful or illegal content – have likewise raised questions and dilemmas about boundaries and responsibility for information dissemination and debate.

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Two key concepts in digital infrastructure

The rise of the internet to the point of being critical infrastructure has changed the way we interact in daily life, and also the underlying power structures in society. Our daily activities are embedded in a global ecosystem, where a few extremely powerful big tech companies control and earn money from every click. These processes and power structures can be understood and explained through the concepts of datafication and platformisation.

Datafication

Datafication is a fundamental element in digital society, and can be defined as the processes by which information on our behaviour, preferences, relationships etc. is collected, systematised and analysed, to create knowledge that can be used for various purposes. Data generated using digital devices and programs can be used to understand or predict traffic congestion, assess people’s state of health, predict possible risks, produce statistics on consumption patterns or political attitudes etc.

As a phenomenon, the concept of datafication is thus not specifically tied to digitalisation or the internet. Human behaviour and conditions have been datafied for millennia through population censuses, registrations of births, baptisms, marriages and deaths, and the like. What is special about digital datafication is that the internet has made it possible to collect ‘big data’, enabling government authorities and companies to collect more extensive and detailed knowledge about far larger groups of people – and process these data using computer technologies.

Datafication has thus become a key concept for understanding the societal opportunities and challenges created by digitalisation, and raises ethical, political, economic and cultural questions about the constant collection and processing of data in our digital lives and society.

Platformisation

Platformisation is related to datafication, as the emergence of digital platforms is largely based on the collection and commoditisation of data. Examples of digital platforms include Google (owned by Alphabet), Facebook (owned by Meta), Apple and Amazon. Each has built a dominant position in the digital market by offering extremely popular services that other players use and depend on to reach users. For example, Google has attained a key position by offering the most popular search engine and an app store. Facebook has attained a unique position disseminating news content and ads, and Amazon is an immensely popular online shopping portal and a leading provider of cloud solutions, which are used to store other content providers’ data.

The concept of platformisation encompasses a deeper infrastructural power, whereby large platforms provide the infrastructure for other digital service providers – for example by assisting them to collect and analyse user data, handling log-in functions, putting them in contact with relevant advertisers and much more. This more hidden, underlying platformisation consolidates the positions of the big tech companies in the digital ecosystem, and enables them to continually expand their commercial activities. Given that the majority of digital services – both public and private-sector – rely on these types of third-party services, it raises important questions about how the collected data are processed and used.

The use of commercial third-party services by public authorities is a key issue in current debates about the consequences of digitalisation. A concrete example of this can be seen in the ongoing criticism of the widespread use of Google Analytics, Google’s user analysis tool, which stores data outside the EU, in violation of the European Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Another example is the Danish Data Protection Agency’s ban on the use of Chromebooks in Danish schools from August 2022 (read more about this in case #1 in the ‘Digitalisation of society’ lesson).

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Reflection exercise

What role does the internet play in your life?

Think back to your childhood and on how the internet has evolved since then. What new forms of communication have emerged, and how do they reflect the technological and infrastructural development of the internet as described above?
Make a list of the communication technologies and services you use during a day. Then work out which institutions and companies offer them. Are they primarily Danish or foreign? Are they government or commercially owned? How are they financed?
Think about the influence the big tech companies – such as Alphabet (which owns Google), Meta (which owns Facebook, Instagram etc.) and Apple – have on your daily life, and how the ways communication technologies are used have changed since you were a child.

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If you want to know more

Article on historical development of the internet

Link to articles and studies on digital infrastructures and dataflows: https://labs.rs/en/about/

Links to information on and monitoring of development of the internet around the world:

https://impact.economist.com/projects/inclusive-internet-index/
https://www.accessnow.org/

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