Regulating the Cloud

Book excerpt: The emergence of the cloud as infrastructure: experts from a range of disciplines consider policy issues including reliability, privacy, consumer protection, national security, and copyright. The emergence of cloud computing marks the moment when computing has become, materially and symbolically, infrastructure—a sociotechnical system that is ubiquitous, essential, and foundational. Increasingly integral to the operation of other critical infrastructures, such as transportation, energy, and finance, it functions, in effect, as a meta-infrastructure. As such, the cloud raises a variety of policy and governance issues, among them market regulation, fairness, access, reliability, privacy, national security, and copyright. In this book, experts from a range of disciplines offer their perspectives on these and other concerns. The contributors consider such topics as the economic implications of the cloud's shifting of computing resources from ownership to rental; the capacity of regulation to promote reliability while preserving innovation; the applicability of contract theory to enforce service guarantees; the differing approaches to privacy taken by United States and the European Union in the post-Snowden era; the delocalization or geographic dispersal of the archive; and the cloud-based virtual representations of our body in electronic health data. Contributors Nicholas Bauch, Jean-François Blanchette, Marjory Blumenthal, Sandra Braman, Jonathan Cave, Lothar Determann, Luciana Duranti, Svitlana Kobzar, William Lehr, David Nimmer, Andrea Renda, Neil Robinson, Helen Rebecca Schindler, Joe Weinman, Christopher S. Yoo