From the Computer Utility to Cloud Computing - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 19

by government or by private enterprise but when it is the latter, utilities
are typically subject to some form of local (city, community) or regional
(state, county, province) regulation. Without entering the dense thicket of
debate over whether they provide a net public beneit over a competitive
market arrangement or whether the government-owned or private utility is
best, it is suficient to state that the utility arrangement is typically chosen
because it is expensive to build the infrastructure for water and power.
When governments conclude that duplicating infrastructure so numerous
competitors can enter the market will likely waste resources, they declare
a “natural monopoly” and establish a public utility.
As the concepts associated with computer technology, among them
cybernetics, information processing, and communication lows, attracted
the attention of a wider circle of scholars and policy makers in the 1950s
and '60s, some began to think of information as a resource not unlike
water and power. The shift from analog to digital methods of processing
information provided a tangible or material output that made it easier
to think of information in resource terms. The mathematicians Claude
Shannon and Warren Weaver (1949) built a widely accepted model of
communication lows that emphasized the materiality of communication
over the abstract senders and receivers through which communication
lowed. They were less concerned with the social forces that made some
people senders and some receivers than they were with identifying com-
munication as a tangible low. When the economists Dallas Smythe and
Herbert Schiller began to turn their attention to communication in the
1950s and '60s, they drew connections between their new ield of study
and the resources, like agriculture and oil, that had occupied economists
for many years (Mosco 2009, 82-89). Around this time the computer
scientist turned public-policy analyst Anthony Oettinger developed a
general resource theory that linked energy and materials to information,
and it became the conceptual foundation for the Harvard University
Program on Information Resources Policy, which Oettinger chaired for
several decades. When the communication scholar Marc Uri Porat (1977)
published his inluential map of the shift to an economy powered by infor-
mation workers, it became time to think about an information economy.
These developments gave renewed force to a view that had been debated
since the emergence of postal communication and extended to electronic
communication technologies, starting with the telegraph and repeated