Essay by Amelia Acker: “…When I teach my students the significance of cloud infrastructure in contemporary information technology, we usually start with a much older information network—the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). Just like our digital data today, a mailed letter is accepted, sorted, and stored, then routed and transmitted across a physical network for delivery. Each of these information processes that support mail delivery requires physical facilities, technical standards, security practices, trained workers, and policy about who gets served and under what conditions. Since the Postal Service Act of 1792, federal policy has attached public obligations to those processes because Americans came to depend on those networked services for information, news, and commerce.
Telecommunications policy has also followed a similar path. Concepts such as universal service, privacy, ensuring continuity, and reasonable access all grew out of fights over who controlled communications infrastructure and what that control required of commercial operators. Just like the USPS mail system, communication networks are critical to participating in society. The Communications Act of 1934 created the Federal Communications Commission to make, as possible, wire and radio communication available to all the people of the U.S. with adequate facilities at reasonable charges. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 later codified universal service formally in Section 254.
The stack of IT services we call “the cloud” is a lot like what the USPS does with our mail. The cloud stores information, moves it across locations, authenticates users, routes and verifies requests, runs applications, and determines who can access data and how. But importantly, storage and transmission increasingly happen inside the stack in ways that make users dependent on these services. This drift towards enclosure and dependency on cloud computing services is sometimes called the generative entrenchment of platforms. A teacher’s entire course can be built in Canvas, a legal contract is shared in Microsoft Outlook and kept in OneDrive, a patient’s medical history is stored in a healthcare records portal. Each is incredibly convenient, but they are all vulnerable to system-wide outages, and portability options vary, making it harder to leave the longer you stay.
The history of postal and telecommunications policy shows that once an intermediary becomes critical to communication, society begins to build expectations around it and attach obligations to its position in the network as a public good. In his book The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, legal scholar Tim Wu analyzes the Telecommunications Act of 1996 as part of a recurring historical cycle where open communications systems inevitably consolidate into centralized monopolies that policy needs to interrupt. A similar pattern is now happening with “hyperscalers” like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, as these firms are accumulating market dominance like telecommunications firms once held.
For infrastructure studies scholars like Ryan Ellis, histories of critical infrastructure—such as telecommunications networks and the electrical grid—show how security crises and outages can bring together publics—workers, corporations, regulators, communities, and governments—whose interests become bound in a shared system. These “infrastructure publics” relate to one another, each with competing interests as they face crises, technology adoption, and regulatory efforts, among other social forces. The global Canvas software hack is a case in point. The software outage showed what securing infrastructure means on the ground and whose interests should receive priority when a shared network system fails its users…(More)”
