When Facebook’s global outage in 2021 disrupted COVID-19 health updates for millions in Argentina and other countries, it exposed an uncomfortable reality that our most vulnerable populations depend on infrastructure controlled by profit-driven entities with little accountability to public interest.
This dependency runs deep. Private companies — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — control nearly two-thirds of the market share in cloud infrastructure. When these companies suspended services to Russia following the Ukraine invasion, millions lost access to Google Pay, Visa and Mastercard to make payments, demonstrating how private control can instantly cut off entire populations from essential services.
The solution increasingly promoted is Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), but technical specifications matter far less than solution orientation.
The Promise and Peril of DPI
India’s Unified Payments Interface exemplifies DPI’s potential. This government-backed payment system that facilitates instant interbank, peer-to-peer and merchant transactions processes over 12 billion monthly transactions. Unlike private platforms, while private firms and their apps can plug into the system, they must use common protocols for exchanging information and enabling payments, and adhere to the rules of the system set out by the government.
UPI has significantly broadened access to digital banking and India is sharing the technology with Australia, France, and Singapore. For development organizations working on financial inclusion, this represents exactly the kind of open, interoperable infrastructure that can democratize essential services.
But orientation matters crucially.
The same country created Aadhaar, India’s digital identity system, which has been criticized for giving the government ‘unjust powers to surveil its citizens and deny them their fundamental rights.’ Kenya’s digital identity system faces similar criticism for its absence of transparency, public engagement and safeguards.
Technical Specs vs. Governance Frameworks
The development community’s obsession with technical components misses the bigger picture. Most discourse surrounding DPI has laid overwhelming emphasis on its constituent parts and technical specifications. This tech-first approach can also lean toward the commodification of essential services with efficiency prioritized over equity.
This represents a dangerous blind spot. A preoccupation with the components of DPI tends to belabour its technical features, while critical questions around the non-technical attributes, such as capacity, governance and sustainability, tend to be deprioritized.
This becomes particularly problematic with the emergence of the “digital welfare state,” where welfare services are delivered, with an increasing reliance on digital platforms and tools. When basic services become digitized without proper safeguards, marginalized populations face the highest risk of exclusion.
The Development Imperative
Rather than getting caught up in technical specifications, development practitioners need to ask fundamental questions:
- How is power distributed?
- Who controls access?
- How are marginalized voices included in design and governance?
We should be embedding governance into its architecture, including responsible design, user autonomy, protocol-based supervision and obligations in code. Estonia’s X-Road system offers a compelling model—built using open-source software and designed intentionally for public benefit rather than private extraction.
We need to engage now while orientation can still be shaped. The emergence of efforts to ‘transfer’ DPI knowledge and technology suggests this infrastructure will spread rapidly, potentially locking in orientations that prioritize efficiency over equity.
It is vital that we proactively consider its orientation and introduce governance frameworks to ensure that digitalization does not exacerbate extant inequities. The choice isn’t between digitalization systems. The choice is between DPI that empowers communities and DPI that concentrates power.
This is a synthesis of Digital Public Infrastructure: Orientation Matters by Soujanya Sridharan, Vinay Narayan, and Jack Hardinges.
