Abstract

The telecommunications sector plays a major role in the imaginaries that today link infrastructure and notions of progress and development (Harvey et al., 2016). Yet, situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic have exposed how inequalities are dramatically reproduced or even amplified by digital infrastructures. The promise of infrastructure (Anand et al., 2018), in the case of internet, could have led some to believe that tele-working and tele-schooling were a real alternative for the majority of the population, which, obviously, has proved not to be true. More broadly, social studies of infrastructure have long stated that inequalities and exclusion of part of the population are inherent to the neoliberal governance of infrastructure networks (Graham and Marvin, 2001). Since the 1990s, ‘cherry picking and social dumping’ became a common mechanism to exclude communities and territories from service provision, based on profitability under finance-oriented business models (Graham and Marvin, 1994). ‘Redlining’, or ‘redzoning’, is a way of excluding specific areas, and the communities who live in them, from a certain service. This practice entails the abdication from the responsibility (Appel, 2012a) of providing a commodity that is expected to be universal, or at least to lack any form of discrimination beyond individual ability to pay. Redlining involves exclusion that is not just individual, but collective and spatially specific. Surprisingly, however, corporate-led exclusion via redlining is scarcely discussed by studies that focus specifically on internet access (for two of the few mentions of the issue, see Fernández et al., 2019, and also my own work). In this chapter, I examine the case of the zonas rojas [red zones] of fixed broadband Internet in Santiago, Chile. Using qualitative semi-structured interviews that involved managers from telecommunication companies, public officials, and community leaders, this work aims to explore the zonas rojas as an institutionalised form of network disadvantage. Two neighbourhoods are the focus of attention: La Pincoya and El Castillo, in the northern and southern outskirts of Santiago, respectively.