We Need to Talk About Infrastructure

Essential internet infrastructure should be content-neutral.  These services should not make editorial decisions that remove content beyond the scope of the law.  This is in part because history shows that any new censorship methods will eventually be abused and that those abuses often end up hurting the least powerful.

That’s the easy part. The hard part is defining what exactly "essential internet infrastructure," is, and to which users. We also need to recognize that this designation can and does change over time. Right now, the "infrastructure" designation is in danger of getting tossed around too easily, resulting in un-nuanced conversations at best and an unjustified cloak of protection, sometimes for anti-competitive business models, at worst.

The term “infrastructure” can encompass a technically nuanced landscape of things – services, standards, protocols, and physical structures – each of which has varying degrees of impact if they’re removed from the proverbial stack. Here’s how EFF thinks about the spectrum of infrastructure with respect to content moderation in late 2022, and how our thinking has changed over time.

Essentially Infra

Some things are absolutely, essentially, infrastructure. These things often have no meaningful alternative, no inconvenient but otherwise available option. Physical infrastructure is the easiest type to see here, with things like submarine cables and internet exchange points (IXPs). These things make up the tangible backbone of the internet.  Parts of the logical layer of the internet also sit on this far side of the spectrum of what is or is not critical infrastructure, including protocols like HTTP and TCP/IP. These components of physical and logical infrastructure share the same essentialness and the same obligation to content neutrality. Without them, the internet in its current form simply could not exist. At least not at this moment.

Pretty much Infra

Then there's a layer of things that are not necessarily critical internet infrastructure but are essential for most of us to operate businesses and labor online. Because of how the internet functions today, things in this layer have unique chokepoint capabilities. This includes payment processors, certificate authorities, and even app stores. Without access to these things, many online businesses cannot function. Neither can nonprofits and activist groups and many, many others. The unique power that things in this layer have over public equity is too much to deny. Sure, some alternatives technically exist: things like Monero, side-loaded APKs, or root access to a web server for generating your own cert with Certbot. But these are not realistic options to recommend for anyone without significant technical skill or resources. There's no denying that when these “pretty much infra” services choose to police content, those choices can be disproportionately impactful in ways that end users and websites can’t remedy.

Not really Infra, but for some reason we often get stuck saying it is

Then there’s this whole other layer of things that take place behind the scenes of apps, but still contribute some important service to them. These things don’t have the literal power to keep a platform’s lights on (or turn the lights off), but they provide an undeniable and sometimes important “quality of life.”

CDNs, security services, and analytics plugins are all great examples. If they withdraw service the impact can vary, but on the internet of 2022, someone dropped by one service almost always has easy-to-obtain (even if not as sleek or sophisticated) alternative solutions.

CDNs are an important example to consider: they provide data redundancy and speed of access. Sometimes they’re more vital to an organization, like if a company needs to send a one-gigabyte software update to a billion people ASAP. A web app’s responsiveness is also somewhat dependent on the reliability of a CDN. Streaming is a good example of something whose performance can be more dependent on that kind of reliability. Nonetheless, a CDN doesn’t have the lights on/off quality that other things do and only very rarely is its quality-of-life impact severe enough that it qualifies for the “pretty much infra” category we just covered. Unfortunately, mischaracterizing the infrastructural quality of CDNs is a common mistake, one we’ve even made ourselves.

EFF’s past infrastructure characterizations

At EFF, we are deeply committed to ensuring that users can trust us to be both careful and correct in all of our advocacy. Our framing of Cloudflare’s decision to cut off service to Kiwi Farms as about “infrastructure,” in a post discussing content interventions more generally, didn’t meet that bar for