Internet interconnection infrastructure: lessons from the global South

This article examines the formation of the first internet exchange point (IXP) in Mexico amid the implementation of telecommunication reforms and asymmetric regulations in a market with low level of competition. An IXP is defined as a shared interconnection facility and a key internet governance arena where players with myriad goals and functions mesh in interlaced technical and political dynamics. The study shows how data centres, passive infrastructure and autonomous system numbers play a critical role that stand out in the context of lack of infrastructure in Mexico. The paper argues that the challenges for an IXP to become stable in such a context in the global South is a result of IXP imagined affordances and the way that infrastructure, the telecommunications incumbent, its competitors, the state regulator, and the IXP operator interact, keeping the initiative in a fragile equilibrium. Issue 4


Introduction
In May of 2014, a cadre of companies, policymakers, and journalists convened at an inaugural event for launching the first internet exchange point (IXP) in Mexico.
An IXP can be initially understood as an internet node, a physical facility where networks interconnect through commercial agreements to exchange traffic and routes on the internet. Networks, in this context, encompass internet service providers (ISPs) that offer internet access to both end users and other ISPs, as well as content providers (e.g., Amazon, Facebook, Google), but can be also government agencies, universities and any other organisation which has an autonomous system number (ASN) to be uniquely identified on the internet. In terms of internet infrastructure, these organisations are known as autonomous systems which run internet networks. Here both terms, autonomous systems and networks, will be used interchangeably.
With regard to the launching of the IXP, Carlos Casasús, president of the committee formed to coordinate the new infrastructure facility, outlined publicly the benefits that would justify that investment. His considerations comprised four key issues: 1. Leveraging the quality of the internet, through the "decrease of latency between connections" and the "improvement of the internet traffic"; 2. Strengthening sovereignty, through avoiding unnecessary international routes, "enriching the country's technological infrastructure, " enabling the country to join others "that are at the forefront of technology"'; 3. Leveraging market competition, helping to establish "a healthier competition among telecommunications operators, " and "attract more foreign investment;" and 4. Generating social benefits, "narrowing the digital divide by making the internet more accessible to more people, " and "encouraging further development of national content online. " (Rivera, 2014, n.p.) While these reasons reflect local motivations, they are also indicative of what is being discussed among international organisations. Many different agencies, including the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the World Bank, have produced reports on broadband development, emphasising the role of IXPs in improving connectivity rates in "developing" countries, reducing internet transit prices, and internet market competition (Blackman & Srivastava, 2011;Intven et al., 2000;OECD, 2013; OECD & IDB, 2016; Weller & Woodcock, 2013).
This article offers a "technical controversy-based" (Musiani, 2015) examination of the creation and implementation of the first IXP in Mexico in the context of asym-metric regulations to balance the economic power of a telecommunication incumbent. It aims to provide an ethnographic understanding of the behind-the-scenes dynamics of internet interconnection to unveil practices of internet governance that inherently lead to certain results over others, impacting the internet that emerges from that. By engaging with ethnographic methods, the paper illustrates the factors that mobilise actors to either support or not the creation of this IXP, and the complex negotiations that keep the initiative ongoing after more than six years of its formation, without delivering the expected results. Negotiations are continuous, strengthening or weakening the emerging facility, in a clear illustration of the competing forces involved in building IXPs in the global South. This case will highlight the need to expand our understanding of an IXP. It is not only "a network facility that enables the interconnection and exchange of Internet traffic between more than two independent Autonomous Systems" (Euro-IX, 2015, p. 3); IXP is a key internet governance arena in which interlaced technical and political dynamics play out.
In the following sections, I present the theoretical framework and methods used in this research. I then examine the dynamics of the IXP formation and implementation for actors who are and are not part of the IXP project, and conclude defining IXP in internet governance terms and pointing to future research.

Theory
Literature on IXPs is extensive, especially in network engineering (Chatzis et al., 2013;Fanou et al., 2017;Klöti et al., 2016), and case studies focusing on single IXPs are noteworthy (Carisimo et al., 2015;D'Ignazio & Giovannetti, 2009;Cardona Restrepo & Stanojevic, 2012). These works build on quantitative methods to elucidate the role of IXPs in internet topology and deployment, with a main focus on internet measurement and performance.
Research and policy reports with a development and economic lens have contributed to understanding the benefits of building IXPs as well as its challenges.
They defend that local IXPs promote better internet quality, by keeping local data local and reducing latency, which converts into better user experience and internet price (Galperín, 2016;Katz et al., 2014). Factors that emerge as constraints for IXPs to succeed include the role of government and regulation, the political instability, infrastructure disparities, and lack of a "critical mass", meaning a group of ISPs willing to collaborate and interconnect (Degezelle, 2015;Fanou et al., 2017;ISOC, 2014). On that, especially in the global South, "it is an extra challenge to convince incumbent networks to connect to the IXP (…) because they do not see the need and fear losing traffic, clients, and income" (Degezelle, 2015, p. 14).
In view of that, some governments have passed legislation aimed at facilitating IXP implementation and functioning (Katz et al., 2014). Until 2014, when the telecommunications sector was passing through reforms in the country, Mexico was the largest state in the world, and the only within OECD, without an IXP (OECD, 2013). Reasons for that include lack of government support, opposition from the incumbent, and the existent alternative for the incumbents' competitors to exchange internet traffic in the United States (Katz et al., 2014).
Internet governance scholarship has increasingly pointed to IXP and internet interconnection as critical topics of everyday practices yet to be investigated (DeNardis, 2014;Epstein et al., 2016;Hofmann et al., 2017;Musiani, 2015;van Eeten & Mueller, 2013). Thus far, works focusing on interconnection that dialogues with internet governance are still scarce (for exception see DeNardis, 2012;Meier-Hahn, 2014; Rosa & Hauge, 2021;Sowell, 2012). This research responds to this gap by exploring the imponderable role of governance in internet infrastructure in Mexico. It is concerned with governance by IXP more than of IXP ( DeNardis & Hackl, 2015), to shed light on how the formation and establishment of an IXP is embedded in social, political, and economic dynamics, and how its supporting infrastructure plays a critical role in the context of a market with low competition.
Due to its unexpected development, the first IXP in Mexico could be used as an example of a "struggling" initiative (Sowell, 2012). Using the global North as a metric, numerous policy reports assess IXPs with such a development focus, especially in Africa, where their deployment has commonly received technical and financial support from international organisations (e.g. ISOC, 2014; Kende & Hurpy, 2012).
Rather than examining the dysfunctionalities of the Mexican IXP from an assessment viewpoint, the present work is interested in revealing the specificities of local internet governance, and new facets of the internet architecture's "technopolitics, "-"the hybrid forms of power embedded in technological artifacts, systems, and practices" (Hecht, 2011, p. 3). The dynamics investigated in Mexico shed light on realities in which the power of telecommunications incumbents and the lack of market competition prevent IXPs from becoming stable infrastructures, particularly in the "global South"-a term that supposes common transnational dynamics, or a "shared condition" in the periphery of globalisation (López, 2007, p. 3). Global South breaks with hierarchical understandings of "developed" and "developing" countries to, instead, understand their differences and inequities.
Examining how regulators and incumbent competitors mobilise to create an IXP, and how the incumbent tries to circumvent such policy, illuminates how the IXP exercises its governance in internet competition. This action is always a shared phenomenon between society and technological artifacts, or infrastructure in this case. Agency, thus, is neither an exclusive characteristic of humans or a property of objects (Latour, 1999); it is a result of their interactions. If action is shared, the object's attributes, or the IXP affordances, should not be taken for granted. Understanding them is as crucial as understanding humans' actions to comprehend any policy outcomes.

Materials and methods
The present work is a result of ethnography of infrastructure (Star, 1999;Star & Bowker, 2010)  Analysis of the data follows the framework of Michel Callon (1984) and the phenomenon of "translation", in which humans' goals and technology functions merge, opening new possibilities of actions and results. In this study, three principles guide the work: agnosticism-impartiality to the parts of a controversy; symmetry-analysis of different perspectives with the same lens; and free association-breaking the divide between society and technological artifacts. By revisiting Callon's approach, internet infrastructure is portrayed as contingent to numerous negotiations, making salient the policymaking dynamics in underlying layers of the internet.

IXP as an outcome of telecommunications reform (2012-2014)
In 2012, the OECD released an influential report on Mexico, one of its few members from the global South, stating that "The welfare loss attributed to the dysfunctional Mexican telecommunication sector is estimated at USD 129.2 billion (2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009) or 1.8% GDP per annum" (OECD, 2012, p. 9). Among its recommendations was that the telecommunications regulator should have the power to impose regulations and sanctions to leverage competition, and with regard to infrastructure specifically, it says that "The inability to mandate, or at least set out, reasonable conditions for infrastructure sharing is arguably one of the main bottlenecks that prevent competition" (OECD, 2012, p. 12).
With the election of a new president that year committed to structural reforms and pro-competition measures (Mariscal Avilés, 2020), this agenda has gained impetus. sharing have always been a point of controversy between the incumbent and its emerging competitors in telephone and internet services (Corona, 2017;Reuters, 2018), with reasons that will be clear later.
It is in this broader scenario of implementing pro-competition regulations that a project to create the first internet exchange point in Mexico gains relevance, as a shared facility to support internet interconnection, ideally with the incumbent. IXP became a prêt-à-porter solution, for a problem that was there for years. Carlos Casasús explains how the idea took advantage of the broader political scenario: We were already talking about having an IXP. I was the chairman of COFETEL's Advisory Board [currently IFT]. I had a meeting with the COFETEL's president and I said 'Why do not we [create an IXP]? It is an OECD recommendation. ' He said: 'Do you think we can do that? We have been working for many years…' So, we managed to get [some] partners to start (personal communication).
Casasús was the first Mexican telecommunications regulator president in the 1990s, after years of work at Telmex as a public company. He is now known for his efforts within the not-for-profit organisation Corporación Universitaria para el Desarrollo de Internet (CUDI), which is responsible for operating the national research and education network (NREN), with the goal of connecting the higher education institutions throughout Mexico. It was in the context of CUDI work that the idea of building an IXP already existed and was shared with colleagues a decade before, in the 2000s. At that early moment, an IXP was seen as a way to improve universities' internet connectivity, keeping the country's content local and decreasing dependence on the United States' infrastructure. However, as one of CUDI's employees remembers: "[The idea] did not prosper because there were not enough fibre networks to do it" (personal communication).
According to Casasús, an inspiration for CUDI and the early stages of an IXP project came from the Brazilian National Research and Educational Network (RNP), a network of universities in Brazil whose goal is also to integrate academic institutions.
RNP has a backbone fibre network running since 1992 with access points in all 27 Brazilian states, facilitating academic network interconnection all over the country, and serving as points of interconnection and data centres of some IXPs. CUDI, though, does not own a fibre network. In fact, the first IXP initiative in Mexico was led by an educational organisation devoid of internet infrastructure resources. This brings about two consequences: First, to account for a lack of infrastructure, it was essential that the first IXP in Mexico be configured to fit the telecommunications regulator's agenda and other players interested in leveraging market competition, to ensure their support and resources. Such frame composes IXP "imagined affordances", attributes that "emerge between users' perceptions, attitudes, and expectations; between the materiality and functionality of technologies; and between the intentions and perceptions of designers" (Nagy & Neff, 2015, p. 5). These include interests and expectations of outcomes that guide actions toward the IXP, and shape its use.
Second, in relying on others' resources and infrastructure, the IXP becomes an entity coordinated by a not-for-profit organisation that needs to reconcile its public interests, named internet quality, sovereignty, market competition, and digital divide issues, with commercial interests of its partners. This is pivotal because typifying IXPs in terms of their business models, including "for-profit", "non-profit cooperative" and non-profit managed" (Chatzis et al., 2013, p. 22) or in terms of the organisation that they are led by-a not-for-profit, industry association, for-profit company, university/government, or informal associations (ISOC, 2014), tell little about governance, the way that power is performed (Gisselquist, 2012). A nonprofit may become less public oriented if it is shaped by private interests and resources.

Implementation and governance of the IXP
In 2014, along with the CUDI president, five companies founded the not-for-profit organisation Consortium of Internet Exchange Traffic (CITI, A.C.): the ISPs Megacable, Nextel, redIT, Transtelco, and the most prominent data centre in the country, Kio Networks. Except for Nextel, all the founders are national companies, motivated to support the project for commercial reasons. For data centres, having an IXP among their co-location clients is beneficial, because the initiative can attract numerous more customers to their facilities. As already noted, "The relation between the data center and the IXP is highly synergic" (Katz et al., 2014, p. 177). For ISPs, that means increased connectivity, lowering their costs of sending and receiving data packets. As noted by one of the IXP founders about their participation in the endeavour, "In the end it is business (…) There is no altruistic issue. Everything is totally and completely business" (personal communication).
The consortium has bi-monthly meetings to discuss administrative issues, including payments, participants, and emergent needs. The networks were required to pay USD 2,400 dollars monthly to be part of the IXP, which gave them access to a port of 10 Gigabits per second (Gbps) to exchange traffic with their peers. While this amount, pushed by the costs of the data centre, follows market practices from the US where data centres run IXPs as for-profit organisations (e.g., Equinix), it is much higher than the price practiced by other not-for-profits in the region. This is a key aspect of the Mexican IXP, a not-for-profit with costs of a for-profit data centre. A central decision in building an IXP is choosing its physical sites (ISOC, 2014, p. 20;Katz et al., 2014). Data centres are responsible for housing IXP equipment, providing what is known as co-location services, as well as IXP building infrastructure, including robust connectivity, cooling, electricity, and security. As a matter of fact, data centres in the global South are known for their higher costs, and Mexico, specifically, is classified as having the lowest level of data centre infrastructure development in Latin America (García Zeballos & Iglesias Rodríguez, 2017). These costs are added to the monthly quota that IXP participants need to pay. As IXP personnel note, such amounts may substantially differ based on data centre policies and costs, with differences up to almost three times between locations.
Given that price is always an additional barrier for smaller networks, the IXP has not been able to attract such players. Despite the fact that some new participants joined the Mexican IXP since its beginning, the membership is still under ten as can be seen in their website-a modest portion of the universe of approximately 450 autonomous systems registered in the country at the time of writing.
The most accurate scenario is that IXP Mexico is still not a stable infrastructure more than six years after its creation. Even if completely operational, the facility is not fully used by its participants. Given that they already had commercial relations with each other beforehand, they are not dependent on that new infrastructure to interconnect among themselves, interviewees say. In January 2020, the Mexican IXP was responsible for a low amount of internet traffic, with a speed of 1Gbps according to its administration. For a rough comparison, the main IXP in Latin America, located in Sao Paulo, Brazil, has an average of more than 4 Terabits per second (Tbps) on the same date. Such a difference from giga to tera scales cannot be explained by comparable differences in total traffic within countries, as business estimatives once available showed that Mexico has been responsible for 1% of the global web traffic while Brazil responds to 3% (Akamai, 2020). The controversies around IXP affordances help understand this scenario below commercial expectations.

Imagined affordances for supporting (or not) the IXP
IXPs are at the core of the internet economy, yet not all data that circulates on the internet traverses an IXP. Estimations are that one out of five paths on the internet tends to pass through an internet exchange .
This represents a huge amount of data that go through hundreds of IXPs worldwide. 1 For ISPs-responsible for the traffic of users' data online, an IXP means the possibility of saving money by building "peering" agreements with other net-works 2 . For instance, every time an end user accesses a website, sends an email, or accepts to update an app, the ISP that serves them needs to find a way to interconnect to that content provider in order to have access to the information requested or to deliver what has been sent. If the ISP is not directly connected to that provider, the alternative is to find who may provide such access. Because of its reach in the country, all Mexican IXP founders were interested in increasing their connectivity with a specific potential peer: the incumbent Telmex, whose routes and clients they could only reach with a third and more costly alternative, which is called "transit". Peering is more advantageous than transit, which is a customerprovider relationship established between two autonomous systems, whereby access to the larger internet (not only to their own routes and customer's routes) is provided through a paid agreement. In a transit relationship, one party with restricted internet reach wants to buy connectivity while the other one has the infrastructural resources and financial settlements to reach any internet address and charge for it. Ideally, transit complements networks' peering agreements, and with a conjunction of these two kinds of arrangements, ISPs are able to deliver internet traffic to the whole internet, making worldwide communication happen (for more, see Faratin et al., 2008;Huston, 2016;Metz, 2001; Rosa & Hauge, 2021).
With regard to Telmex, which did not connect to the IXP project in the beginning, the IXP founders defend that its participation in the initiative is crucial for its success, given that the company not only has the biggest number of clients, concentrating 51.6% of the fixed broadband market, but it also has the largest infrastructure to reach different parts of the country, with more than 190,000 km of optic fibre (Telmex, n.d.). The controversy emerges in that the same reason that makes the incumbent so valuable to a public interconnection facility is also the reason for the company to not express interest in being part of the IXP.
As already noted, "the largest telecommunications companies tend to view IXPs as antagonistic to their business" (Katz et al., 2014, p. 121, own translation). An incumbent, technically known as a Tier-2 ISP for its national reach (as opposed to Tier-1 ISPs with world reach, and Tier-3 with a more regional one), has commercial incentives for not sharing its infrastructure through peering with potential com-1. Although the number of IXPs in the world is not precise, at the time of writing, there are more than seven hundred active facilities distributed across the globe according to Packet Clearing House (PCH) online database.
2. Peering is a collaborative relationship in which autonomous systems, such as ISPs, allow the networks with whom they peer to have access to both their own routes and clients' routes in order to have the same benefits in return, so they can freely send and receive data packets among each other.
petitors. Economically, it is seen as more advantageous to sell transit to Tier-3 ISPs than to peer with them. In Mexico, Telmex is one of the most likely companies from which any ISP would buy transit, as infrastructure is the incumbents' crucial ally. This is how a former incumbent collaborator, speaking in a personal capacity, synthesises the situation:  (Pohle & Thiel, 2020). Considering that for the regulator IXP's imagined affordances make it a tool to primarily leverage competition and sovereignty, the IXP gained a law as a key ally.

A controversial mandatory peering policy (2014-2017)
Guided by the purpose of leveraging competition in the country, the law that marks the reform in the telecommunications sector had established that the preponderant economic agent should: "Have a physical presence in the Internet ex-change points in the national territory, as well as to enter into agreements that al-  Professor Luis Martínez, also the Internet Society (ISOC) Chair in Mexico, speaking in personal capacity, argues further that building an IXP at that moment was "a political and not a technical decision", meaning that the IXP was a government response to OECD's agenda. Also not involved with the initiative, Judith Mariscal, a professor and specialist in telecom and digital divide issues, pointed out in an interview with the author that the IXP was Carlos Casasús' and CUDI's agenda. For this author, the processes of the Mexican reform were notably closed, kept stakeholders apart, and eventual public consultations worked as "clear simulations of a deliberative process" (Mariscal Avilés, 2020, p. 10 Significantly, access to antennas, posts, and right-of-way-the legal possibility of passing cables through public spaces-is intimately related to this scenario. Because the incumbent used to be a public company, its access to supporting infrastructure is facilitated, making competition lopsided, interviewees report. And 3. These price differences are not particular to Mexico. For instance, in Argentina, small towns used to have 1 Mbps as high as USD 500 dollars, comparing to USD 25 dollars in the capital city (Galperín, 2016).
while this infrastructural imbalance has been an important focus of action in recent asymmetric regulations within the country (IFT, 2018;Lucas, 2018;OECD, 2017), the high costs to access optical fibre links persist. Luis Martínez, who owns a small network, explains why it is not worth it to participate at the IXP to connect to the larger internet, as it is cheaper to get such connectivity as the incumbent's regular customer : "(…) What Telmex will charge [for a fibre line] to take me to IXP is going to be more than what Telmex will charge to provide me the internet service without having to go to the IXP" (personal communication).
It therefore stands out not only that the IXP was not seen unanimously among specialists, but also that CUDI did not incorporate a broader group of actors whose agendas dialogue with the IXP's expected social outcomes, including its promise of "leveraging the quality of the internet" and "narrowing the digital divide". Further, the lack of competition in certain markets, and the incumbent's and other ISPs' price policy create difficulties for new indigenous connectivity projects and small ISPs to flourish with autonomy. Although the formation of the first IXP in Mexico had representatives from academia, the private and public sectors, these actors were restricted to CUDI's president network circle. Broader civil society was and continues to be absent.
From an economic and social perspective, in case the IXP generates the results as expected by regulators-amplifying market competition-this could reduce the connectivity costs that indigenous initiatives and small ISPs face. However, the mandatory peering regulation has not worked as expected.

How the incumbent interconnects circumventing the law (2019-)
In a scenario where actors stand in support of, against, or distant to the IXP, the regulations, which bolstered the IXP initiative the most, have achieved partial results. On the one hand, Telmex physically connected to the IXP in 2019 with the push of the 2017 regulations, as well as the resolution of an official disagreement process with the IXP before the regulator. On the other hand, the company has so far not exchanged traffic as expected.
The disagreement process is revealing. As the regulator defined a group of compa- The strategy is based on technical knowledge. A network exchanges traffic through its routers associated with an autonomous system number (ASN), which in the case of Telmex is the AS8151. Public databases disclose that such ASN is owned by Uninet S.A. de C.V., the "Internet connectivity and access provider for TELMEX and corporate customers" (Telmex, 2016, p. 19, own translation

Further barriers and alternatives to IXP stability
Because local interconnection infrastructure plays a protagonistic role on the enrollment (Callon, 1984)  Access to passive infrastructure clearly stands out as a crucial barrier in the South.
To be part of the IXP, an organisation needs to be physically connected to its infrastructure in the data centre(s) where the IXP is collocated. 4 Thus, a network needs to pay for transport to physically arrive at the data centre, e.g., hiring a fibre link from their headquarters to the IXP, if the interested network is not already based in this data centre. Counterintuitively, this kind of link can be more expensive than paying for a regular transit provider, like the incumbent, to give access to the larger internet, because these incumbents commonly have advantages in right of way and access to posts and towers in the country. In Argentina, where this has also been an issue, the government financed twelve thousand kilometres of optical fibre to help reduce internet transit costs, consequently creating an environment to build a network of IXPs in small towns, all connected to the main node in the capital Buenos Aires (Galperín, 2013). More effective mediation of incumbents' practices may also be necessary.
Finally, a blind spot in the IXP literature is the discussion at the level of ASN assignment. A recent study in Latin America suggests a significant relationship between concentration in internet address space and the lack of deployment of IXPs.
For instance, in Mexico, Telmex AS8151 owns 55% of the internet protocol addresses delegated in the country, and that ranks it closer to countries with no IXPs or with small ones (Carisimo et al., 2020). Importantly, CUDI reports universities' difficulty to get access to ASNs, preventing their ability to connect to IXP. In fact, data about NIC Mexico, responsible for selling ASNs in the country, indicates a limited number of assignations, as Mexico represents only 4.1% of ASNs (N=457) assigned in Latin America, less than half of Argentina (N=1093) (RIRS, 2020), a much less populous country, but with a mature IXP ecosystem.
In practice, to have an ASN means more control over connectivity to the larger internet, the ability to manage its own routing policies, peer at IXPs and buy transit when necessary, instead of being served by an ISP only. In Mexico, 80% of CUDI's university network have Telmex as their ISP (CUDI, n.d.). While being part of an IXP would not necessarily lead these universities to leave this commercial relationship with the incumbent, it would make them less dependent on an ISP only. The technopolitics of ASN assignment is also related to IXP deployment and should be included in future regulation discussions.

Conclusions
At the crossroads of internet governance studies and science and technology studies, this article contributes to the study of internet infrastructure in the global South. Its original contribution includes reframing engineering definitions to further investigate internet technopolitics. Conceptually, an IXP can be finally defined as a shared interconnection facility and key internet governance arena where players with myriad goals and functions mesh in interlaced technical and political dy-namics for designing the online flow of information. Negotiations are continuous, strengthening or weakening IXP equilibrium; the internet that arises is a result of these dynamics where law, infrastructure, and actors' purposes interact.
By mediating interconnection, IXPs have a crucial role in internet competition. In line with previous findings, this research shows that Tier-2 ISPs are unlikely to be IXP supporters. Large CDNs who already have agreements with the main country's ISPs (Tier 2), will also be unlikely to fully support an IXP, unless new players not otherwise reachable, such as small ISPs (Tier-3), are there. Access to passive infrastructure, transport links, and ASNs has an impact on how Tier-3 players will be able to interconnect, though, as lack of access to infrastructure prevents that from happening. On the other hand, Tier-1 networks may be favoured by a dysfunctional IXP, as transit services are the best option for incumbent competitors to reach the incumbent's network as they refuse to peer.
The study of internet infrastructure with an ethnographic lens in Mexico exposes the dynamics of pro-competition laws otherwise unseen with top-down and institution-focused research approaches. Further research on the politics of infrastructure is necessary, particularly the relation between ASN assignments and internet interconnection, and how infrastructure affordances play a role in regulatory outcomes. Players with substantial market power are often supported by underlying layers of infrastructure and how they are distributed. Non-attention to such context and spaces of mundane internet governance limits the comprehension of internet policies and the internet in the global South.