[p2p-research] Information feudalism and permanent rent in the cloud

[Alex Rollin]

Information feudalism and permanent rent in the cloud

Cory Doctorow’s editorial in the Guardian has an implicit warning.  
Cloud Computing may be the vehicle for extracting permanent financial  
rents, in a form of license-based feudalism. Cory also thinks it is  
unwise to rely on a corporate cloud in times of financial turbulence.


(Information Feudalism is the thesis implicit in Jeremy Rifkin’s Age  
of Access that holds that we are entering a regime where the freedom  
of property makes place for the unfreedom of licensing, in effect  
placing limits on what we can do with the things we purchase,  
resulting in a new kind of capitalist serfhood.)


Cory Doctorow:


“Since the rise of the commercial, civilian internet, investors have  
dreamed of a return to the high-profitability monopoly telecoms world  
that the hyper-competitive net annihilated. Investors loved its pay- 
per-minute model, a model that charged extra for every single  
“service,” including trivialities such as Caller ID – remember  
when you had to pay extra to find out who was calling you? Imagine if  
your ISP tried to charge you for seeing the “FROM” line on your  
emails before you opened them! Minitel, AOL, MSN — these all shared  
the model, and had an iPhone-like monopoly over who could provide  
services on their networks, and what those service-providers would  
have to pay to supply these services to you, the user.


But with the rise of the net – the public internet, on which anyone  
could create a new service, protocol or application – there was  
always someone ready to eat into this profitable little conspiracy.  
The first online services charged you for every email you sent or  
received. The next generation kicked their asses by offering email  
flat-rate. Bit by bit, the competition killed the meter running on  
your network session, the meter that turned over every time you  
clicked the mouse. Cloud services can reverse that, at least in part.  
Rather than buying a hard-drive once and paying nothing – apart from  
the electricity bill – to run it, you can buy cloud storage and pay  
for those sectors every month. Rather than buying a high-powered CPU  
and computing on that, you can move your computing needs to the cloud  
and pay for every cycle you eat.


Now, this makes sense for some limited applications. If you’re  
supplying a service to the public, having a cloud’s worth of on- 
demand storage and hosting is great news. Many companies, such as  
Twitter, have found that it’s more cost-effective to buy barrel-loads  
of storage, bandwidth and computation from distant hosting companies  
than it would be to buy their own servers and racks at a data-centre.  
And if you’re doing supercomputing applications, then tapping into  
the high-performance computing grid...




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20090906/9bf032f4/attachment-0001.html>