Cloud Services, AI, and the rise of Digital Rentier Capitalism
Who owns the Internet? What seems like an abstract question might actually help us challenge the changing ownership of our digital infrastructures.
Who owns the Internet? This seems like a ridiculous question. Of course, the Internet is not one thing: in fact, O’Hara and Hall (2021) argue that there are four Internets, each owned and characterised within different geopolitical and cultural contexts (in Silicon Valley, Brussels, Washington DC and Beijing). Nor are each of those Internets a single entity: they are made up of server farms, cables, networks, data, relationships, institutions, laws, and more. However, the question ‘Who owns the Internet?’ remains valuable insofar as it enables us to question the shifting relationship of ownership and capitalism in the global network which was once the symbol of distributed ownership (Peters, 2021).
Many writers have drawn on Standing’s (2016) notion of ‘rentier capitalism’ to explore the shifting dynamics of digital capitalism (e.g. Birch, 2020; Gilbert, 2020; Sadowski, 2020). Rentier capitalism extends Marx’s distinction between two classes — the proletariat and the bourgeoisie — to explore the emergence of a ‘rentier class’ who generate income not from labour, but instead through rent extracted from the assets they own or control (Forrester, 2016). Most obviously, this happens through property landlordism: landlords extract income from money charged to renters, which enables them to accumulate capital without engaging in a worker-capitalist relationship. In a digital age, this dynamic is intricately linked to ‘platformisation’, whereby technology platforms charge ‘rent’ for providing access to various services, including taxis (Uber), holiday rentals (Airbnb) or meal deliveries (Deliveroo) (Poell et al, 2019; Sadowski, 2020).
However, this dynamic doesn’t just apply to the renting of physical assets. It’s also reflected in the rise of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) models which enable companies like Adobe and Microsoft to shift from one-time purchasing of their software to a licensing model where the user ‘rents’ access to their applications. Dressed under the guise of ‘continual support’ and ‘frequent upgrades’, models such as Adobe CC (for Photoshop or Lightroom) and Office365 (for Microsoft Word or Excel) create a dynamic in which the end user pays a monthly subscription fee for access to a service without ever really owning anything.
The model of rentier capitalism is not only evident in the ownership of physical objects or of software, but it starts to really shape the question of ‘Who owns the Internet?’ where the line between the two becomes blurred. The rise of Cloud computing services offered by companies like Amazon (AWS), Google (GCP) and Microsoft (Azure) accompanies the emergence of technologies such as Infrastructure as Code (IaC) which enable informational infrastructures to be remotely configured in flexible arrangements. This blurs the line between hardware and software, as organisations can configure the exact requirements of their hardware infrastructures by simply tweaking lines of code. The ability to do so increases the ease with which companies can outsource management of their hardware infrastructures to Cloud service providers, in turn benefitting from the economies of scale offered by ‘Cloud Economics’. These infrastructures are then rented back ‘as a service’ by a small number of monopolistic Cloud providers who take growing control of the Internet (Nadler and Cicilline, 2020).
This dynamic is exacerbated by the glorification of data- and compute-intensive forms of AI which require expensive and powerful computers on which to run (Whittaker, 2021). Since few organisations can afford to buy or maintain such large and expensive systems (Whittaker, 2021), access to the ‘cutting edge’ of AI remains dependent on these large-scale Cloud providers.
As a result, the question of ‘Who owns the Internet?’ is an important one which is shifting and evolving. ‘Rentier capitalism’ offers a useful lens through which to understand the concentrated nature of Internet ownership. Although there are countless actors underpinning the loose construction we denote ‘The Internet’, more and more of our core infrastructures — from government, to healthcare, to education — are hosted on the Cloud. So, to understand the role of rentier capitalism in the digital age, it’s essential to not only look at the artifacts we’re renting, or the platforms we’re renting them from, but also at the role of companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft in controlling access to the infrastructures which underpin them.
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