The debate over digital sovereignty obsesses capitals and boardrooms. It forgets the cables, the relays, and the maintenance technicians. Britt Paris spent eight years observing rural cooperative networks, municipal internets, and community devices in the United States to show that real access to a network depends on its maintenance and who bears responsibility for it.
The Essentials
- The governance of maintenance shapes whether a digital infrastructure is public or commercial.
- Eight years of fieldwork on alternative American networks: cooperative, municipal, community-based.
- Architecture decisions made during deployment influence communities’ ability to retain control over their networks.
- By 2040, territories will either have or lack effective governance rights over their networks.
A Researcher in the Field, Not in the Conference Room
Britt Paris is an information scientist researcher at Rutgers University. Her work focuses on digital infrastructures, access inequalities, and alternative forms of network organization. Radical Infrastructure is her first book, published in February 2026 by the University of California Press, following an inquiry begun in the mid-2010s. The book is part of a current in infrastructure studies that, since Susan Leigh Star, treats technical networks as political objects: arrangements between actors, not simply neutral conduits.
Paris conducted an ethnographic inquiry: meetings of rural cooperatives in the Midwest, municipal councils deliberating over a fiber network, technicians intervening on weekends after a storm cuts off a village’s connection. She did not work from public policy documents or annual operator reports, but directly in the field.
The Thesis: Maintenance as a Political Act
The book examines the possibilities and obstacles to people-centered Internet infrastructures, including their construction, deployment, maintenance, and use.
It is a seemingly modest thesis. It is in reality decisive. Most debates about the “digital divide” (the fact that certain populations remain poorly connected) concentrate on deployment: who finances the cables, who gets the subsidies, which operator wins the contract. Paris shows that these questions, however important, say nothing about what happens next. A network deployed by a private operator can degrade when the contract expires or the operator changes.
The community may then lack technical skills, contractual rights, or documentation to intervene on the infrastructure.
Maintenance is a critical moment for any infrastructure. It concretely reveals power relations: who can intervene, who must wait, who bears the cost of the outage. In the cooperative networks she studied, members vote on repair priorities, sometimes contribute physically to the work, and generally know who to call.
In areas dependent on an external private operator, the wait can be measured in weeks, and no one locally has the authorization to intervene on the equipment.
Lessons from Rural Cooperatives
The most convincing part of the book concerns rural electricity cooperatives that have converted to the internet, mainly in the American South and Midwest. These structures, born in the 1930s to electrify areas that private companies deemed unprofitable, began deploying fiber networks in the 2000s and 2010s, often without waiting for federal subsidies.
Paris observes there a governance model that internet economists have poorly documented. Cooperative members are both users and co-owners. They elect a board of directors that hires local technicians, often from the territory. Maintenance decisions, such as extending a segment or giving priority to a school rather than a residential area during a repair, are political decisions made by people who live with their consequences.
This model has limitations that Paris documents honestly. The smallest cooperatives struggle to finance equipment renewal. They sometimes lack the expertise to deploy newer technologies. And their democratic governance can slow decisions that would require quick responsiveness. But they have an advantage that private networks do not: memory.
When a technician retires in a rural cooperative, his colleagues know where the cables are, why a particular junction was placed there, what decision made in 1998 explains the current topology. This technical memory is a political resource.
Municipal Internets, Between Ambition and Fragility
The book’s second major field is municipal networks—cities that decided to build and operate their own fiber infrastructure. Paris followed several of these, observing varied trajectories.
The failure cases are instructive. Some cities launched ambitious networks and discovered they had not built the internal competencies necessary to operate them. Outsourcing maintenance could place these cities in a position of dependence, with the financial burden of an infrastructure they no longer controlled.
The successful cases observed generally come with investment in internal competencies. The city of Chattanooga, Tennessee, often cited as a model of municipal internet, built a permanent technical team capable of maintaining, extending, and adapting the network. This team is an ordinary public expense, like water service or road maintenance workers. Paris emphasizes that this obvious point—treating a digital network like a standard public infrastructure—took years to establish, and it remains contested in many state legislatures where legal provisions exist that ban or limit municipal networks. Twenty-two states were counted as explicitly banning municipal networks or imposing rules likely to make them difficult, a fact Paris cites to show how much the battle over network governance is an ordinary political battle, with lobbies, campaign funding, and legislative majorities.
The Book’s Blind Spots
Radical Infrastructure has unexamined assumptions that careful reading reveals.
The first is geographic. The inquiry concentrates on the United States, and more precisely on rural configurations and small towns. Paris does not address large metropolitan areas, where the question of network governance poses itself differently: the stakes of density, competition between operators, and federal regulation have a distinct weight. Transposing her conclusions to New York or Los Angeles, or even more so to non-American contexts such as European cities, would require additional work that the author does not undertake.
The second blind spot is economic. Paris observes an association between local governance of maintenance and certain access outcomes, but measures little the costs of this governance. Rural cooperatives and successful municipal networks may cost more, at equal quality, than private solutions, depending on public funding arrangements. A municipal network financed by municipal bonds at low rates does not have the same economics as an unsubsidized cooperative network.
Paris skims over these trade-offs without fully examining them.
The third concerns technology. The book was written during a period when fiber networks were the reference technology for broadband. The rise of low-orbit satellite networks, with actors like Starlink, modifies the landscape in ways Paris does not truly anticipate. These networks, accessible in rural areas without terrestrial infrastructure, pose governance questions that are radically different: the subscriber has no control over the satellite, but access is real. Paris’s thesis withstands this counterexample, but it would have benefited from confronting it directly.
On similar issues of infrastructure dependence, one can consult what South Africa has experimented with in the governance of its sovereign data: a useful parallel for measuring what it concretely means to retain control over a critical resource.
Subscribers or Governors in 2040
Paris does not engage in forecasting in the strict sense. But her analysis carries within it a question that territories will have to settle over the next fifteen years.
Architecture and ownership decisions made today during network deployment, whether federally subsidized fiber in American plans or digital infrastructure financed by European recovery plans, will fix the constraints within which communities will operate in 2035 or 2040. A network deployed by a private operator under a long-term contract, without reversibility clauses or open documentation requirements, risks creating dependencies. A network designed with interoperability standards, documented maintenance obligations, and community takeover rights offers more flexibility.
Two trajectories are emerging, without either being inevitable. In the first, communities remain customers: they pay a subscription, suffer outages, negotiate service contracts without ever acquiring the technical competency that would make the negotiation balanced. Access is there; sovereignty is absent. In the second, municipal, cooperative, or hybrid networks consolidate around shared rules: interoperability of equipment, transparency of ownership, regular maintenance funding. Paris documents experiments that illustrate this trajectory.
It presupposes several conditions that academic literature identifies: alternative sets of support, a critique of technosolutionism, the repoliticization of infrastructure, and cooperativity.
The usual indicators of digital policy—fiber coverage rates, connection speed, number of connected households—measure deployment without saying anything about governance. Evaluating a public digital project on its maintainability and reversibility, not only on its coverage, would constitute a change in logic. The signals to watch are concrete: the share of municipal or cooperative networks in underserved areas, the evolution of reversibility clauses in digital public procurement, and gaps in cost and repair time depending on whether maintenance is internalized or outsourced.
On this last point, the reflection converges with concerns similar to those raised by interoperability of payment systems: opening a system is not enough if governance rules structurally advantage the dominant actor.
The Book’s Interest
Radical Infrastructure addresses three types of readers. For researchers in social sciences of the digital, it offers a solid empirical framework for thinking maintenance as an analytical category in its own right. For practitioners of digital policy—elected local officials, community workers, civil servants overseeing deployment plans—it provides concrete tools to ask questions that standard tender processes do not include: who maintains, with what skills, according to what priority rules, with what documentation. For readers curious to understand how ordinary technical decisions produce durable political effects, it offers what few books on the digital provide: patient fieldwork, with real people, on real networks, in named places.
The book does not claim that rural cooperatives or municipal networks are universally superior to private operators. It shows that the question of governance deserves to be posed at the same level as the question of coverage, and that concrete experiments already allow comparison of results. At a moment when states are injecting tens of billions into digital infrastructures, this look at what comes after deployment is useful. It is the kind of book that changes less the idea one has of a subject than the way one looks at a familiar object—here, a cable buried under a country road—and what it says about who decides what for whom.
Bibliographic Information
Title: Radical Infrastructure: Imagining the Internet from the Ground Up
Author: Britt Paris
Publisher: University of California Press
Publication date: February 17, 2026
Sources
- Britt Paris, Radical Infrastructure: Imagining the Internet from the Ground Up, University of California Press, 2026. https://www.ucpress.edu/books/radical-infrastructure/hardcover
