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Paper Short Abstract:

This paper applies the analytical notion of infrastructural power to empirical background research in Spain to critically explore the production of new forms of dissonant governance, where public necessities are outsourced to private corporations.

Paper Abstract:

In recent years, Big Tech companies have massively invested in the creation of data centres in Spain, turning the country into their Southern European digital hub. The key factors orienting this choice are the country’s favourable geographic position, “a bridge between continents”, easy reach by submarine cables, and the possibility of benefiting from some tax reductions on consumables such as water and electricity. In an increasingly digital society, data centres are an essential part of the concealed infrastructure people use to perform everyday activities, providing essential services (hosting, software, hardware etc.) to thousands of private companies and public institutions. The fact that such privately owned infrastructure serves as the backbone of public services makes a case for the dissonance between the essential importance of digital services and the private property and management of the infrastructure necessary to provide them. This paper applies the analytical notion of infrastructural power (Mann 1984) to empirical background research in Spain to critically explore the production of new forms of dissonant governance, where public necessities are outsourced to private corporations. Big Tech infrastructural power situates them in a governing position to manage essential services (both physical and digital) provided by the state. This power delineates an ongoing reconfiguration of the relation between the realms of political power and that of the market actors. How can the government ensure appropriate legislation without conflict of interest?