Peer(ing) pressure: Achieving social action at scale in the Internet infrastructure

We evaluate a rare successful intervention in the management of Internet infrastructure - an anti-spoofing campaign which has achieved genuine traction against an issue that has dogged the network engineering community for more than thirty years. While much scholarship in the security literature has sought to establish the perverse commercial 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 \textit{infrastructural capital} to explain how key actors were able to relocate the issue of spoofing away from the commercial incentive structures of a decentralised community 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.