As the fight over net neutrality grinds onward in the courts, Congress and state governments, a new and potentially more ominous threat to internet freedom is just over the horizon—in the cloud.
An alarming new report by Wired magazine published on Monday warns that “a multibillion-dollar, privately owned infrastructure is now essential to the modern internet economy. And as Wired reporter Molly Wood adds, “that should freak you out.”
The “cloud” may sound like a “soft and fluffy” way to host data, but in reality that cloud consists of a worldwide network of data centers — vast concrete, climate-controlled bunkers about 2 million square feet each “made up of colossal electrical generators, diesel fuel tanks, battery arrays, and bulletproof doors,” as Wood writes.
Behind those doors, “thousands of machines connected to the fastest possible internet connections, providing offsite storage and computing power to businesses” that would never be able to afford the hundreds of millions of dollars required to build and maintain such services and facilities.
But Amazon, Microsoft and Google (aka Alphabet) can afford them, and do. Microsoft alone maintains more than 100 “cloud” facilities in 20 countries around the world. For businesses who just need a place to host and run their sites, the corporate “cloud” works wonders. But the problem and the “threat,” Wood writes, is that the cloud exists “at the pleasure, and continued profit, of a handful of companies.”
And while the internet itself is essentially a public utility subject—at least in theory—to government regulations such as net neutrality rules, the cloud is private, operated almost entirely by the those three big tech companies which have both spent billions to create the cloud, and profited billions by operating it. Amazon alone pulled in $10 billion from its Amazon Web Services last year.
And while the three mega-companies have largely made the 21st-century internet possible with their cloud computing services, the other end of the bargain is that those companies now hold absolute control not only over economic activity online, but over what internet users are able to see and hear over the internet.
“Given how critical the cloud has become for a huge swath of the tech economy,” Wood writes, “maybe we should ask ourselves whether this infrastructure should be in the hands of a few trillion-dollar companies.”
To date, the massive financial incentives for the three big tech firms to avoid censorship, or other forms of heavy handed control over content, have kept the cloud relatively open. But what if they change their minds?
“Cloud-based companies are still leasing space in a dragon’s cave,” the Wired report warns. Should Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft hit on another, better way to make money, then the laws of nature will inevitably take over: Those fledglings will be devoured.”
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