My Own Pirate Radio

Jon Udell did a blog post and an InfoWorld article this week on Amazon’s new S3 storage service. At the end of his blog post he comments, “With a service like S3, we could all agree to use Amazon’s politically neutral object store. With the right wrappers, we could even continue to use our own preferred applications.” And he muses further, in his InfoWorld piece:

I’d like to find out whether metering infrastructure services in this way will prove technically and economically viable. When we talk about a grid of Web services, we like to compare it to the power grid, but the analogy is deeply flawed in at least one way. My electric bill isn’t itemized. I don’t know what it costs me to run each of my appliances, or how long it will take to amortize the cost of replacements. Lacking this feedback, we make poor individual decisions that, collectively, add up to a tragic misallocation of resources.

Neat thought. It reminds me, though, of a little nightmare I’ve nursed for years: what will happen when we come to rely heavily on chunks of “public utility” computing infrastructure? If such services become truly essential to our daily lives, will governments decide to treat them as Essential Services, and regulate them? Think electricity, roads, water, Plain Old Telephone Service, 911. Think EU, Microsoft Windows, Windows Media, and Messenger. Yes, I know, entirely different business situations in these cases, but same underlying government motivations: control, and often, protection of entrenched local interests.

It seems obvious to me this sort of regulation is inevitable in areas like communications, where newfangled stuff like Voice Over IP will eventually get dragged into the same regulatory tarpit that POTS is in. (I so hope it won’t happen, but in my heart of hearts I know many incumbents in the telco space will work very hard to make it so.) But what about other kinds of services, like storage, identity, and search? In 10 or 50 or 100 years might these things be regulated, the way electricity is? Or will providers manage to prevent these services from becoming regulated commodities?

Broad horizontal computing services are incredible beasts to work on. It’s very heady stuff, making something that hundreds of millions of people use. But these big beasties also attract all kinds of attention that the service providers don’t want. Let’s hope the service providers keep innovating and treat their customers well, thereby staving off the heavy hand of government control.