Peer(ing) pressure: maintenance, care, and infrastructural capital in a cybersecurity intervention at Internet scale

We discuss a successful intervention in the management of Internet infrastructure – a campaign which has achieved genuine traction against a cybercrime issue that has dogged the network engineering community for more than thirty years. Internet infrastructure is often characterised as beset by perverse incentives which frustrate the achievement of common goods – establishing fixes to deep design issues with Internet architecture involves communal action at scale which is hard to manage in a decentralised, competitive, and marketized ecosystem of providers. While much scholarship has sought to establish the incentives frustrating action against cybercrime and identify possible ways to alter these, in this case we observe a community acting to short-circuit them entirely. We develop the concept of infrastructural capital to explain how key actors were able to relocate the issue of spoofing away from the commercial incentive structures of a decentralised ecosystem of competing providers with little motivation to solve the issue and into the incentive structures of a far more densely networked and centralised professional community of network engineers. This extends previous work applying theory from infrastructure studies to cybercrime economies, developing a new account of how power can be asserted within infrastructure to achieve change, apparently against the grain of other long-standing incentives.