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Will be more difficult than we think
 Honolulu - special to the IIC. The likely prospect of the communications cloud inspires many. But in regulatory terms it is no panacea and may well lead to more regulatory minefields that the architectures and technologies of the past.
Professor Eli Noam of the Columbia Business School ticks off the issues that could arise early on: “I started thinking about this in the context of the [announced] Federal Trade Commission [analysis of cloud computing in terms of privacy and security]…this is the tip of the iceberg. If this becomes big - and it will become big - then the all the usual policy suspects plus new policy suspects [will become evident].”
Privacy and security are just two, he says, but there are others. He continues: “There’s the issue of who can do what, call it ‘cloud neutrality’, media content, quasi-broadcasters, media laws, there’s the issue of off-shoring of industrial policy, off-shoring of electronic commerce, off-shoring of technology and jobs, loss of sovereignty to foreign companies and to potentially hostile foreign governments, payment imbalances, domestic ownership issues.
There’s the issue of market powers, suppose some applications become dominant (which you would expect) and some service providers become dominant then you have will bundling which will lead to antitrust issues and then you have unbundling issues [ultimately]”.
Life is no longer simple
In summary, he says, all the issues that we will have been dealing with in other contexts will be issues for the cloud. Familiar telco style problems also emerge: “There’s the issue of universal availability and the government as a cloud provider and on and on.”
So what happened to the idea that cloud networking would be easier across the board? “Unfortunately, “ says Prof Noam, “people like to believe that new approaches mean less regulation. I think in the context of clouds, it could really be the opposite. This is because in the digital and online world, you can identify who provides the service, and that is where the regulatory nexus becomes much stronger.”
The cloud seems fuzzy in more ways than one. Even the meaning of the new environment seems open to question. “ There’s a lot of different definitions possible. You still need hardware and software. But it comes to an old issue too: how much centralized intelligence and decentralized intelligence do you need,” says Matthias Kurth, President of the Federal Network Agency BNetzA, the German regulator.
“But at the end of the day you need physical substance,” he continues,” you need contracts and you need money [to do business] and that’s not going to a cloud. In terms of privacy and security, he says “there is already a lot of concern about these issues. There has to be clear responsibilities for these issues – you cannot give these to a cloud. We need to have a sensible balanced regulation for these things. Not regulating them is not an option.”
- Stephen McClelland
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