Cloud computing: how information giants are setting the pace for the internet's next decade
From Google's library project to Apple's iTunes store, 'cloud capitalism' provides an innovative way forward for business – but raises more questions about privacy and security
It is a vast orphanage, yet its inhabitants are not children, but millions of books that have been unceremoniously dumped by their owners, locked away unseen and unread. Many of the books' authors are still alive. That is not the problem. The trouble is that the copyright owners – the publishers – no longer think they will profit from making these books commercially available. Yet the owners decline to free the books and make them publicly available, in case someone else makes money from them. Many books will only be in commercial print for a couple of years before they are packed off to the orphanage to spend decades in the dark.
A tragically high proportion of our culture lies trapped in this cultural coma, including perhaps 95% of commercially published books and tens of thousands of films. That is why Google's project to digitise more than seven million orphaned books, as part of a digital library that could exceed the Library of Congress, should be welcomed. A treasure trove of culture and ideas will be opened up for more people than ever to access. No one else was going to do it, so Google is footing the bill. That should be good for all of us.
Yet Google's plans have also induced a sense of foreboding, chiefly among publishers and writers. By liberating the orphans, Google will acquire huge power over the future of publishing. It will be able to head off potential competition from other databases of digital books. As we trawl through Google's library, the company will acquire yet more information about our habits and interests, which it will aggregate in its vast servers, and analyse with its clever algorithms, to sell advertising to us in yet more ingenious ways. A profit-driven corporation, run by self-confessed software nerds, is an unlikely custodian of the world's literary heritage.
The debates over Google's plans are just the first of many to come about who will control our culture when so much of it is stored in vast clouds of data swirling above us. Google is the first and most successful exponent of a new kind of economic power: cloud capitalism.
Another is Apple, which, like Google, can appear both very open, public spirited even, and cleverly commercial. Apple's beautiful devices, the iPod and the iPhone, are made much more compelling because of the carefully managed clouds of music and applications that they allow access to. The iTunes cloud has provided a model for how to make money from culture online, but it also includes masses of free educational content. The iPhone cloud has created an entirely new market for people to sell content and applications through mobile phones, and so turned the mobile phone industry on its head.
These early exponents of cloud capitalism are setting the template for others to follow in the next decade. As they do, the internet, which even in its short life as the information superhighway and cyberspace, will change once more in ways that will engender both excitement and foreboding.
Not long ago we had stand-alone computers, in my case an Amstrad with a green blinking screen, on which I kept my paltry data and simple software. The internet linked these separate computers, so that files could be sent, for example, as attachments to emails, peer-to-peer. The web landed on top of the internet to link separate documents. Browsers let us surf these links. The ethics underpinning all this came from a mixture of hippies, geeks and 1960s academics who believed in collaboration to share information and ideas.
The internet that the cloud capitalists want to give us is quite different. In cloud computing, our data – emails, documents, pictures, songs and software — will be stored remotely in a digital cloud hanging above us, always there to access from any device: computer, television, games console, hand-held and mobile. We should be able to draw down as much or as little of the shared cloud as we need.
When the New York Times wanted to make available on the web 11 million articles dating from 1851 to 1989, the paper scanned in the stories, converted them to TIFF files, and uploaded them to Amazon's cloud service S3, taking up four terabytes of space on Amazon's remote servers. Apparently someone in the IT department signed up for the service on the web using a credit card. Then using Amazon's EC2 computing platform, the TIFF files were turned into PDF files. The paper created an archive of 11 million articles entirely by using resources borrowed from the cloud.
The promise is that we might get as many different kinds of computer-generated clouds as there are in the sky, from solid stratus to high-altitude cirrus. The World Digital Library, which is being created by a set of the world's leading museums, will be a permanent, global public cloud. Wikipedia is a cloud of self-managed, user-generated information. Some clouds will emerge in a crisis and have a fleeting life. Ushahidi emerged after Kenya's disputed elections in 2007-08 for people to report where violent attacks were taking place by using a mashed-up version of Google Maps.
The machines making these clouds are vast, energy-efficient data centres and server farms – 7,000 in the US to date. Google has two million servers operating around the world. Microsoft is reportedly adding up to 35,000 servers a month in places such as its data centre outside Chicago, which covers 500,000 sq feet (46,000 sq metres), costs $500m and will hold 400,000 servers.
The rise of cloud capitalism has led to a vicious civil war with the media old guard: last year, Rupert Murdoch accused Google of stealing his content and unveiled plans to charge his online readers. Yet the truth is that old media industries will increasingly rely on the cloud to get to their customers, whether it is books on ereaders, online newspapers on an iPhone or films on an iPad.
However the potential power of these cloud providers raises all sorts of fears, not least for privacy, security and reliability: outages of Google servers have left millions of gmail users without a service. There will be disputes over who owns the particles in the cloud: witness the furore over whether Facebook owns pictures posted by its members.
More worryingly, commercial providers of cloud services will have strong incentives to manage their users to maximise revenues and to discourage them from roaming from one service to another. Providers of cloud services are bound to have preferred suppliers of software and other services they will promote. The cloud capitalists will want to harvest all they can from their clouds, which means turning you and me, our preferences and interactions into pieces of information to be analysed by algorithms. They will not see us as readers, customers or members, but as bits of linked information.
We could soon find cloud services trying to shape our lives. An algorithm at Facebook recently recommended that I reconnect with my wife (we live together very happily, thanks), while Amazon recommended I buy a copy of my own book. Clumsy nudges such as this are not the worry; we should worry when the algorithms become so sophisticated that we don't realise it is happening.
Perhaps most worrying of all will be the relationship between these corporate clouds, holding vast amounts of data about us, and governments keen to bring the web under control, whether in the name of security, decency or maintaining social order. Governments have not known what to make of the freewheeling internet; they will be much more comfortable dealing with a few corporations that will turn the free-for-all into something more manageable.
Governments are busy trying to get the internet under control, while traditional media companies fight a series of doomed rearguard actions against the web. The real power is passing to the cloud capitalists who are organising a digital landscape that is only just coming into view. What will get lost in all of this are the interests of citizens and consumers. Whose cloud is it anyway?
This essay is based on Cloud Culture: How the web is shaping global cultural relations, published tomorrow by Counterpoint, the think tank of the British Council.
Charles Leadbeater
The Observer, Sunday 7 February 2010
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010
Two futures of the internet: next cold war or up in the clouds
From Google's library project to Apple's iTunes store, 'cloud capitalism' provides an innovative way forward for business – but raises more questions about privacy and security
It is a vast orphanage, yet its inhabitants are not children, but millions of books that have been unceremoniously dumped by their owners, locked away unseen and unread. Many of the books' authors are still alive. That is not the problem. The trouble is that the copyright owners – the publishers – no longer think they will profit from making these books commercially available. Yet the owners decline to free the books and make them publicly available, in case someone else makes money from them. Many books will only be in commercial print for a couple of years before they are packed off to the orphanage to spend decades in the dark.
A tragically high proportion of our culture lies trapped in this cultural coma, including perhaps 95% of commercially published books and tens of thousands of films. That is why Google's project to digitise more than seven million orphaned books, as part of a digital library that could exceed the Library of Congress, should be welcomed. A treasure trove of culture and ideas will be opened up for more people than ever to access. No one else was going to do it, so Google is footing the bill. That should be good for all of us.
Yet Google's plans have also induced a sense of foreboding, chiefly among publishers and writers. By liberating the orphans, Google will acquire huge power over the future of publishing. It will be able to head off potential competition from other databases of digital books. As we trawl through Google's library, the company will acquire yet more information about our habits and interests, which it will aggregate in its vast servers, and analyse with its clever algorithms, to sell advertising to us in yet more ingenious ways. A profit-driven corporation, run by self-confessed software nerds, is an unlikely custodian of the world's literary heritage.
The debates over Google's plans are just the first of many to come about who will control our culture when so much of it is stored in vast clouds of data swirling above us. Google is the first and most successful exponent of a new kind of economic power: cloud capitalism.
Another is Apple, which, like Google, can appear both very open, public spirited even, and cleverly commercial. Apple's beautiful devices, the iPod and the iPhone, are made much more compelling because of the carefully managed clouds of music and applications that they allow access to. The iTunes cloud has provided a model for how to make money from culture online, but it also includes masses of free educational content. The iPhone cloud has created an entirely new market for people to sell content and applications through mobile phones, and so turned the mobile phone industry on its head.
These early exponents of cloud capitalism are setting the template for others to follow in the next decade. As they do, the internet, which even in its short life as the information superhighway and cyberspace, will change once more in ways that will engender both excitement and foreboding.
Not long ago we had stand-alone computers, in my case an Amstrad with a green blinking screen, on which I kept my paltry data and simple software. The internet linked these separate computers, so that files could be sent, for example, as attachments to emails, peer-to-peer. The web landed on top of the internet to link separate documents. Browsers let us surf these links. The ethics underpinning all this came from a mixture of hippies, geeks and 1960s academics who believed in collaboration to share information and ideas.
The internet that the cloud capitalists want to give us is quite different. In cloud computing, our data – emails, documents, pictures, songs and software — will be stored remotely in a digital cloud hanging above us, always there to access from any device: computer, television, games console, hand-held and mobile. We should be able to draw down as much or as little of the shared cloud as we need.
When the New York Times wanted to make available on the web 11 million articles dating from 1851 to 1989, the paper scanned in the stories, converted them to TIFF files, and uploaded them to Amazon's cloud service S3, taking up four terabytes of space on Amazon's remote servers. Apparently someone in the IT department signed up for the service on the web using a credit card. Then using Amazon's EC2 computing platform, the TIFF files were turned into PDF files. The paper created an archive of 11 million articles entirely by using resources borrowed from the cloud.
The promise is that we might get as many different kinds of computer-generated clouds as there are in the sky, from solid stratus to high-altitude cirrus. The World Digital Library, which is being created by a set of the world's leading museums, will be a permanent, global public cloud. Wikipedia is a cloud of self-managed, user-generated information. Some clouds will emerge in a crisis and have a fleeting life. Ushahidi emerged after Kenya's disputed elections in 2007-08 for people to report where violent attacks were taking place by using a mashed-up version of Google Maps.
The machines making these clouds are vast, energy-efficient data centres and server farms – 7,000 in the US to date. Google has two million servers operating around the world. Microsoft is reportedly adding up to 35,000 servers a month in places such as its data centre outside Chicago, which covers 500,000 sq feet (46,000 sq metres), costs $500m and will hold 400,000 servers.
The rise of cloud capitalism has led to a vicious civil war with the media old guard: last year, Rupert Murdoch accused Google of stealing his content and unveiled plans to charge his online readers. Yet the truth is that old media industries will increasingly rely on the cloud to get to their customers, whether it is books on ereaders, online newspapers on an iPhone or films on an iPad.
However the potential power of these cloud providers raises all sorts of fears, not least for privacy, security and reliability: outages of Google servers have left millions of gmail users without a service. There will be disputes over who owns the particles in the cloud: witness the furore over whether Facebook owns pictures posted by its members.
More worryingly, commercial providers of cloud services will have strong incentives to manage their users to maximise revenues and to discourage them from roaming from one service to another. Providers of cloud services are bound to have preferred suppliers of software and other services they will promote. The cloud capitalists will want to harvest all they can from their clouds, which means turning you and me, our preferences and interactions into pieces of information to be analysed by algorithms. They will not see us as readers, customers or members, but as bits of linked information.
We could soon find cloud services trying to shape our lives. An algorithm at Facebook recently recommended that I reconnect with my wife (we live together very happily, thanks), while Amazon recommended I buy a copy of my own book. Clumsy nudges such as this are not the worry; we should worry when the algorithms become so sophisticated that we don't realise it is happening.
Perhaps most worrying of all will be the relationship between these corporate clouds, holding vast amounts of data about us, and governments keen to bring the web under control, whether in the name of security, decency or maintaining social order. Governments have not known what to make of the freewheeling internet; they will be much more comfortable dealing with a few corporations that will turn the free-for-all into something more manageable.
Governments are busy trying to get the internet under control, while traditional media companies fight a series of doomed rearguard actions against the web. The real power is passing to the cloud capitalists who are organising a digital landscape that is only just coming into view. What will get lost in all of this are the interests of citizens and consumers. Whose cloud is it anyway?
This essay is based on Cloud Culture: How the web is shaping global cultural relations, published tomorrow by Counterpoint, the think tank of the British Council.
Charles Leadbeater
The Observer, Sunday 7 February 2010
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010
Two futures of the internet: next cold war or up in the clouds
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