Infrastructure as ‘public good’: The Limits of Local Governance in a Global Internet (CARGC Press)
Since its creation in 1998, the first Internet Exchange Point (IXP) in Brazil, located in São Paulo, was under the auspices of FAPESP (São Paulo Research Foundation), a state foundation that had a key role in the first steps of internet development and governance in Brazil. An IXP is generally known as a physical facility that helps internet service providers to interconnect and exchange traffic, optimizing their costs to send and receive data packets over the internet. In 2002, understanding that forthcoming investments in such infrastructure should come from the private sector, FAPESP signed a statement of cooperation with Terremark, an American data center company, incorporated years later by Verizon, and the operation of the first Brazilian IXP was transferred to it.