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. Read the rest of this entry »