We Need to Talk About ‘Cloud Neutrality’

guest · Feb 17, 2020

We Need to Talk About ‘Cloud Neutrality’
A multibillion-dollar, privately-owned infrastructure is now essential to the modern internet economy.
That should freak you out.
February 10, 2020
https://www.wired.com/story/we-need-to-talk-about-cloud-neutrality/

We spent a lot of years talking about net neutrality—the idea that the companies that provide access to the internet shouldn’t unfairly block, slow down, or otherwise interfere with traffic even if that traffic competes with their services. But there’s an even bigger issue brewing, and it’s time to start talking about it: cloud neutrality.

“While its name sounds soft and fluffy,” Microsoft president and general counsel Brad Smith and coauthor Carol Ann Browne write in their recent book, Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age, “in truth the cloud is a fortress.”
Smith and Browne note cheerfully that Microsoft operates or leases more than 100 such facilities in 20-plus countries and hosts at least 200 online services.

Each data center costs hundreds of millions of dollars to build and many millions more to maintain; and you pretty much can’t build a successful new company without them. So, thank goodness for Microsoft, right?
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To me, it reads like a threat. The cloud economy exists at the pleasure, and continued profit, of a handful of companies.
The government can set rules about how companies have to interact with their customers. Whether and how it sets and enforces those rules isn’t the point, for now. It can.

That’s not the case with the cloud.
This infrastructure is solely owned by a handful of companies with hardly any oversight. The potential for abuse is huge, whether it’s through trade-secret snooping or the outright blocking, slowing, or hampering of transmission.
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Consider where things are heading, though: Control of the market for cloud services—and the means of competition—is consolidating under the handful of tech giants that have enough money to blanket the globe with data centers.
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Nebulus · Feb 17, 2020

Each data center costs hundreds of millions of dollars to build and many millions more to maintain; and you pretty much can’t build a successful new company without them
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Umm... what?

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We Need to Talk About ‘Cloud Neutrality’

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