Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization

Galloway's thesis is that the internet is not, in any politically meaningful sense, a space of freedom — it is a space of protocol. He argues that TCP/IP and DNS constitute a new form of control that operates not through hierarchy or centralized authority but through the voluntary adoption of shared technical standards. The book draws directly on Deleuze's concept of "societies of control" and on Foucault's analysis of distributed power, applying both to the actual engineering of network architecture. Galloway reads RFCs as political documents and routing tables as instruments of governance. The result is a theory of power that takes the OSI model seriously as a diagram of how authority is exercised in distributed systems. It remains the sharpest political reading of the internet's technical infrastructure.