The Cloud Con
Cloud computing is being embraced as a way to have access to software and services wherever you are. Cloud customers can take advantage of the huge benefits that only cloud providers can give, like powerful AI features in small and simple devices and apps. The cost is the loss of ownership of, and agency over, the software, services and data we use and generate.
As compute use moves to the cloud, the (very few) cloud providers exercise more power over the market than software makers ever did. The deep knowledge of how to build and maintain compute stacks up to the level of running AI’s is becoming impossible for individuals and small companies to acquire or maintain. Therefore, the ability to do something new and cutting edge becomes completely contingent on the few corporations that do maintain such knowledge and ability.
Giving a few dozen colleagues a usable computers fow word processing is doable for a moderately skilled IT person. O the other hand, giving even a single person access to a service like Alexa requires billions of dollars, a huge team of specialists and expansive infrastructure if you have to go from scratch.
Consider that cloud providers are already ‘too big to fail’. Imagine Azure, Amazon Web Services, facebook or iCloud collapsing. Talk about a fragile system! Where individual component faillure doesn’t matter in a cloud, faillure of the cloud provider as a whole has an extreme impact. No-one wants to see that happen, because we maintain our lives, our businesses and our collective knowledge in there.
Of course, all this centralization provides lots of benefits. For states, it’s much easier to tax, police and regulate five gargatuan corporations than it is to tax, police and regulate a souk-like internet that is a thriving soup of digital improvisation. For the less digitally literate it’s much easier to hop on the 21st centure bandwagon by talking to Alexa then to figure out how to use a command line interface. These benefits should not be understated.
Nation states derive their legitimacy from the unique scale at which they provide benefits to society, like building a network of roads and ensuring that similar law and contracts are universally enforced. The scale and benefits of cloud providers are approaching the same level of societal impact, which over time bestows a measure of sovereignty, making antitrust efforts unlikely, even as regulation around privacy matters provides a modicum of guidance.
We can live in the walled garden on top of these cloud providers very comfortably, playing with cheap, ubiquitous and powerful software. What we cannot do is turn back time on the cloud con and remake the internet into what in once was in all it’s messy, chaotic and promising imperfection. I miss the nineties.
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