Database Reference
In-Depth Information
7
C
hapTer
1
T
he
C
loud
a
Te
M
y
h
oMeWork
Like water or electricity, cloud computing should now be con-
sidered a key utility and therefore should be available to all.
(Groucutt 2013)
The Internet had been around for a while when on July 5, 1993, the
New
Yorker
magazine featured a cartoon that, in the minds of some, marked its
real
arrival. “On the Internet,” says the dog at the computer screen to his
canine friend, “nobody knows you're a dog.” I knew it was time to write
this topic when I woke up one morning, downloaded my digital edition
of the October 8, 2012,
New Yorker
, and came across a new version of
a classic cartoon. A little boy looks up at his teacher and, with hope and
trepidation, pleads his case: “The cloud ate my homework.” Okay, perhaps
not everyone got the joke, but most readers would have some conception of
the cloud as the place where data lives until it is called up on the computer,
tablet, or smart phone—or, in the case of a malfunction, the place where
data goes to die. This topic explains what little Johnny is talking about
and why it is important. For better or for worse, the cloud has arrived.
The cloud that ate Johnny's homework is a key force in the chang-
ing international political economy. The global expansion of networked
data centers controlled by a handful of companies continues a process
of building a global information economy, once characterized by Bill
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