politics

Net Neutrality-the lifeblood of the cloud

Cloud providers in the US should thank their lucky stars there’s a new guy at the FCC who is moving ahead with policies that will guarantee net neutrality.

What is net neutrality? Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up: the telco carriers that built and maintain the physical infrastructure of the internet want to charge more money for service to the biggest consumers, and throttle usage by their prix-fixe customers (home and small businesses) if those users actually try to use the bandwidth they signed up for.

In opposition to this is, naturally, everyone else. Prejudicial network pricing is precisely contrary to the expectations of a market-driven economy- you’re supposed to pay less and less as you buy more and more. It’s predatory and would be drag-iron for the entire online economy to say the least- imagine if HP actually charged more per server sold to its best customers? Now imagine HP was the only server vendor who served your zip code. Sorry for the horrifying thought, all you hardware buyers.

To put the fight in perspective, you could combine en suite, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and Amazon and you’d have a company almost as big as Verizon. Verizon is only one of four major telecommunications companies in the US.

To date, the telcos haven’t been able to browbeat the FCC into letting them leverage their monopoly into predatory billing, partly because opposition is so stark and partly because there is a vestigial sense that utilities that provide a public benefit ought not to be allowed to victimize the public at large.

The implications of net neutrality for the public cloud are plain; because it’s basically margins-driven, any squeeze from carriers would hamstring providers. Amazon’s cloud success is driven precisely by the fact that using it is easy and costs about the same as running your own server, minus the investment.

If it became more expensive to run a cloud server than a real server, which prejudicial network pricing would assuredly do, cloud adoption would stumble badly. Little users would stick with hosting; enterprises might still move into private cloud, but there would be no compelling reason for them to stick appropriate applications and data in the public cloud

The true benefits of cloud computing– cheap, elastic and massively parallel computing power at the finger tips of the bright young things in industry and academia– would never be realized, since Comcast or Verizon would be lying in wait to pounce on data crunching projects and surcharge them.

On the other side, the SaaS explosion would fizzle if Salesforce.com suddenly had to pony up for its millions of users, for instance- not a single free service out there would stay open a day past the day it had to charge to make up for overage charges, nor would the umpteen start-ups predicated around cloud, both using and selling, get off the ground if they had to plan for a crop share with their telco landlords if the business got popular.

Without net neutrality, in short, cloud would go where its ancestors — utility and grid — went, to the backwaters of research or in the vast wastes of enterprise, just part of the gaggle of professional services sold to the large corporations. Utility and grid ended up there because they lacked all the things that cloud realizes- speed, ease, availability and economy. Cloud computing is supposed to obscure the infrastructure layer; it needs a level playing field to do that.

So Amazon, Rackspace, Google and all the others should wipe their brow in relief that they’ve got at least 3 or 4 years to really let the whole idea take hold and become a mainstay in the economy rather than a sideshow.

That doesn’t leave much time for dilly-dallying.

Cloud computing surfaces in local politics

In a demonstration of cloud computing’s increasing stature in the real world, Washington state freshman state representative Reuven Carlyle called for scrapping a $300 million data center in favor of cloud computing last week.

“We are deeply troubled by the weakness of the technical and financial support behind this decision, and fear the state is potentially making a $300 million mistake,” Carlyle said in a letter to Governor Christine Gregoire published on Carlyle’s website. Co-written with Representative Hans Dunshee, the letter was first picked up by Pacific Northwest regional news site Crosscut.com

In a nutshell, the letter calls for a halt to a bond sale to fund the project and a review of existing cloud services, like “Google, Microsoft, Amazon or others as many companies and governments are doing today.” Further, it argues that the trend in outsourcing data and services is a fait accompli and a better use of taxpayer dollars.

Unfortunately, Carlyle’s letter sometimes reads like it was written by a jingo-happy IT vendor. To wit: “How best to efficiently and effectively move away from hardware-centric, expensive, proprietary, silos of data trapped in old databases to open, transparent, flexible, accessible, customer-oriented applications available via the Internet?” he asks.

(I think we’ve all snoozed through that PowerPoint talk, no?)

This is understandable. Carlyle comes fresh from the communications industry, where silos are not filled with grain and budgets are fine-tuned with an axe, as opposed to government, where silos are more than likely filled with grain and budgets are fed like foie gras geese.

Dunshee appears to be a more traditional politician; interestingly, he lists many unions as backers, groups likely to want state construction dollars.

It’s unclear why Carlyle and Dunshee believe the new IT infrastructure would go to waste. What’s notable, however, is that cloud is now commonplace enough that a politician will throw it out there and hold traditional IT up as the poorer model. That’s a long step in discourse from “cutting edge.”