Why should fans of culture care about the design of Internet infrastructure?

Abstract:
The technical features and underlying structre of communication systems are not the usual starting point for those concerned about content: a system's "plumbing" seems irrelevant to many analyses of cultural policy. However, this essay demonstrates that on the Internet the link between the two can be direct and important. The case of broadcasting on the Internet (meaning one-to-many communication, multicasting, and Web content caching) shows that obscure changes in low-level Internet protocols dramatically shape who may participate in cultural production. Current design features distribute costs so that users are assumed to be passive receivers and that producers of popular content must be moderately well-capitalized. As the scholarly literature on technology predicts, "technical" questions about how a particular function should be realized mask answers about who uses it, what they do, and who pays. The egalitarian ideal of new communication technologies is then lost or gained in a series of early implementation decisions that are debated in solely technical terms, despite their political character and cultural import. This situation argues for an "infrastructural cultural policy:" one where structural, technical decisions about the system require direct involvement by public interest advocates charged with giving voice to the voiceless.