March 5 - 5 of Pentacles

The five of pentacles. An all-seeing eye uniting the concepts of physical infrastructure, content, and code controlling the infrastructure above the banner of Internet Governance. A ring of mountains around a lake represent events in the development of standards, public policy and education about the internet. above the mountains is a cloud representing The Cloud Security Alliance, which has a line connecting it to another cloud, filled with the logos of tech corporations that supported the alliance. In the middle of the lake is a hole representing the establishment of ICANN in 1998, under the US department of commerce, building on how the initial Internet Assigned Numbers Authority was administered by a department of defence contract.

A difficult situation, struggle, financial insecurity.

Infrastructure... precisely that thing it never feels like there's enough cash for. ESPECIALLY in tech, where it always flows towards hype and disruption rather than maintaining what already exists.

The Internet is so huge, has such great practical benefits, and is an important part of so many peoples' lives, that of course we want the infrastructure maintained, and there to be good governance... Maybe it was the hype of the Internet itself that allowed some of these early gestures towards standardization and productive ground rules to stick.

Though there are a ton of tech corporations involved, a surprising amount was also done via the US Department of Defense directly, and now a lot of the corporations (ex- Don't Be Evil Google, for example) are chipping away at the principles they once helped set up... Whose infrastructure? It's always tied to governance, and always ideological. Be careful who you go asking for cash when you're broke...