![]() ![]() In the early 1990s, a user would operate a “personal home page,” hosted by an internet Service Provider (ISP), usually located in the country where that user lived. The first mention of the notion of the “cloud” was in a 1996 diagram in an MIT research paper, redrawn here. As with most technology, there is a sense of abstraction from prior experiences in the cloud the user no longer needs to understand how a software program works or where his or her data really is. The cloud is more like Bismarck’s unification of Germany, sweeping up formerly distinct elements, bringing them under a central government. User data and content materials are dispersed over different servers, domains, and jurisdictions (i.e., different sovereign countries). The internet can be compared to a patchwork of city-states, or an archipelago of islands. The computation and the data and so forth are in the servers. Obviously, Google, Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon come to mind. ![]() There are a number of companies that have benefited from that. And that if you have the right kind of browser or the right kind of access, it doesn’t matter whether you have a PC or a Mac or a mobile phone or a BlackBerry or what have you-or new devices still to be developed-you can get access to the cloud. We call it cloud computing-they should be in a “cloud” somewhere. ![]() It starts with the premise that the data services and architecture should be on servers. I don’t think people have really understood how big this opportunity really is. NET software programs did not reside on any one computer, “but instead exist in the ‘cloud’ of computers that make up the internet.” 4 But it wasn’t until 2004 that the notion of “cloud computing” was defined by Google CEO Eric Schmidt: A 2001 New York Times article reported that Microsoft’s. The paper talked about a “confederation” of networks governed by common protocol. 3 This was the first reported usage of the term “cloud” in relation to the internet. 2 In the cloud’s architecture of power, the early internet is eclipsed.Ī nondescript diagram in a 1996 MIT research paper titled “The Self-governing Internet: Coordination by Design,” showed a “cloud” of networks situated between routers linked up by Internet Protocol (IP). Many of the cloud’s most powerful companies no longer use the shared internet, but build their own dark fiber highways for convenience, resilience, and speed. It is a by-product and parallel iteration of the global (information) economy, enabling a digital (social) marketplace on a worldwide scale. The cloud, as a planetary-scale infrastructure, was first made possible by an incremental rise in computing power, server space, and trans-continental fiber-optic connectivity. Wael Ghonim, Google's Egyptian executive, said: “If you want to liberate a society just give them the internet.” 1 But how does one liberate a society that already has the internet? In a society permanently connected through pervasive broadband networks, the shared internet is, bit by bit and piece by piece, overshadowed by the “cloud.” The Coming of the Cloud We are the voluntary prisoners of the cloud we are being watched over by governments we did not elect. ![]()
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