Shaping Information Infrastructure Evolution : Governmental Claims of Architectural Control Points

Payments are central for society. Historically, it involved two parties exchanging goods and services for money. Today, payments, with increasing frequency, consist of digital representations of money that are transferred through globally intertwined network. Payments involve many parties such as payers, payment services providers, banks, central banks, telecom operators, mobile handset manufactures, and payees. The digitization of payments that occurs around the world, leads to the emergence of Digital Infrastructure (DI) that is characterized by the number and heterogeneity of included socio‐technical components, relations, and their dynamic and unexpected interactions. DIs are IT solutions that frequently are the shared responsibility of an ecosystem, including private and governmental agencies. In consequence, development of DIs requires approaches that are different from the traditional systems development approaches. It is about modifying (changing and extending) a distributed installed base, shaping the evolution of DIs in desired directions. In this paper we inquiry into the possibilities for actors, such as governments, interested in the DI to influence its evolution towards specific ends. Specifically, through a case study of the payment infrastructure we identify and describe the role of legal and technical architectural control points. These control points are parts of an DI that have particular strategic importance, for example a monopolized gateway or a de jure mandatory standard for behavior or data interchange