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because they have kept alive the early cloud-computing discussion of build-
ing systems that are not primarily under vendor control and operate in a
more environmentally sustainable fashion (Briscoe and Marinos 2009).
What's Missing?
Although the words public and community are used in cloud computing,
every cloud model is presumed to be a private service operated by a business
with the goal of maximizing proit. Government systems, which often use
private provisioning (even the CIA will be using Amazon Web Services
for $600 million worth of cloud projects), are primarily employed for
management, control, and surveillance (Babcock 2013a). In the context
of cloud computing, “public” simply means that vendors will sell to the
general public rather than to a single preferred customer, and “community”
refers to the common commercial interests shared by users of that cloud
model—for instance, they are all airlines. These are very narrow uses, if
not outright distortions, of the terms public and community. The public
traditionally refers to citizens who participate in the decisions that affect
their lives, and a community is a collection of active citizens with common
interests. The history of computing has included extensive debates about
public and community participation in the construction of networks and
in the provision of services. Unless a cloud system is speciically set up to
provide information to a public or to a community of citizens, then the vast
majority of people do not participate in the cloud as citizens, but rather as
consumers who are valued not for their participation in decision making
about the cloud, but rather for their propensity to purchase services and
to provide information to companies about their consumption patterns.
In addition to being an extraordinary leap in processing and storage
power over early cloud-like systems, cloud computing, unlike computer
systems that preceded it, is a singularly market-driven project with little
consideration of alternatives to the model of management and control
that governs it. Where are the debates about using the cloud to expand
economic or political democracy? How about worker participation in
corporate decision making or greater citizen participation in national or
community life? What about public participation in decisions about cloud
data centers or cloud systems? Unlike earlier communication systems
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