Non-profit internet and the division of activist labour

The social sciences often present collectives advocating for an alternative, non-profit internet as marginal and inaudible (Hintz and Milan, 2009; Alexandre et al., 2022). Yet, whereas in France associative internet service providers (ISPs) are still relatively invisible nationally, in 2020 the German parliament recognized the free network Freifunk as being in the public interest. If the non-profit internet is reserved for a competent elite, how can we explain why the fates of free infrastructures differ so much? Based on the ‘ethnography of infrastructures’ programme (Star, 1999) and a survey of associative ISPs in France and Germany, we show that alternative services have shaped a discourse of resistance to the commercial internet that, to some extent, has echoed public policy. In particular, we analyse the role of the division of labour in the success of these collectives, whose mission is as much to build connection infrastructures as to formulate a discourse of advocacy on their behalf. Achieving recognition as being in the public interest appears to be correlated with a division of labour around these two missions, within distinct institutions.