In his critics to globalization with a global South lens, Milton Santos defended the existence of three worlds: the world that hegemonic actors want people to believe—or the globalization as a fable; the world as it is—or the globalization as perversity; and the world as it could be—or an other possible globalization (Santos 2000).
In this presentation, I want to apply Milton Santos interpretation to the study of the internet infrastructure and its materiality when it comes to the relations between the global South and the global North within internet interconnection dynamics. Using as empirical data the comparison between two internet nodes, technically known as internet exchange points (IXPs), the largest one in the global South located in São Paulo, Brazil, and the largest one in the global North located in Frankfurt, Germany, this research-based presentation will illuminate current sociotechnical phenomena that elucidate social, political, and economic aspects embedded in the internet and contemporary global communication.
The research shows how big content providers from the North, and their business strategies to set their servers in certain internet nodes and not in others, lead to unequal flows of information, in which internet service providers from the South choose to interconnect and exchange traffic in internet nodes in the North to optimize their costs, while the opposite direction (North to South) is unlikely to happen. Internet service providers are responsible to transport data packets from one point to another on the internet and IXPs are key to facilitate such processes. In shedding light on these dynamics, this study unveils infrastructural interdependencies between North and South otherwise invisible in policymaking and scholarship. It challenges the so-called narrative of “free-flow” of information online, defending that it can be better understood as a fable, only possible when the concealment of the global South in the narrative is at place.
