In the summer of 2013—the summer of the Edward Snowden revelations—I was an intern at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), an agency within the Commerce Department tasked with developing policies to promote and govern communications technologies. It was a heady time for internet policy, and one of the highlights of that summer was sitting in on a meeting with Fiona Alexander, then associate administrator of NTIA’s Office of International Affairs, as the administration responded to some of the debates that followed in the wake of Snowden’s disclosures.

More than a dozen years later, I am now an internet law professor, and fewer and fewer students understand the events of that summer. The Snowden policy debates have receded into history. We need to teach internet history to inform future internet governance efforts and efforts to govern whatever technical systems come next. To do so well, we need internet histories, including accounts by veterans of those debates.

With “Geopolitics at the Internet’s Core,” Alexander and her co-authors—Laura De Nardis, Nanette S. Levinson, and Francesca Musiani—have contributed to filling that need. The book focuses exclusively on issues relating to the internet protocol. The internet protocol is the set of rules that makes the internet possible. These rules determine how data is formatted, addressed, and routed from one point in the internet’s vast network of networks to another. By allowing communications or other data to be broken up into packets and reassembled at the specified destination, the internet protocol facilitates efficient movement of data across many machines connected in complex ways and often separated by vast distances. At first glance, the internet protocol may thus seem like nothing more than a set of technical rules. But Alexander and her co-authors persuasively make the case that the internet protocol “is and will continue to be a space of control and power.”