Data Clouds

The cloud is the future for the internet. All your stuff saved on large server farms somewhere in the world. But...

FIRST we do not want a world of clouds branded Google or Apple. So we need public clouds, such as Wikipedia, but for many sorts of material - Music Video, Art. We have public libraries and museums, now we need public clouds.

SECOND there is a threat from corporate control. We need to regulate commercial clouds, to limit their power and to expose them to competition. Our personal information stored in clouds needs to be safe and to clearly belong to the person rather than the cloud.

THIRD is the rear-guard action being fought by many media companies to prevent clouds forming (especially the music and publishing industries). At the heart of this is copyright. Cloud culture will breed creativity only if people can easily collaborate, share and create. New forms of licensing are required, building on open access and creative commons, which are designed to allow sharing but also to channel rewards to creative artists.

FOURTH is the threat from government control of the cloud on grounds of state security, public decency or economic necessity. These threats do not just come from authoritarian regimes in the east, but also from western liberal democracies where governments lack the courage to stand up for the open web.

FIFTH is inequality. When people from the poorest countries arrive in the digital world they will find people in the rich countries a long way ahead. For cloud culture genuinely to promote global cultural relations, we should focus on development of tools for use world wide.

Threats to the cloud, summary

The potential for a more cosmopolitan, open, cloud , which could connect hundreds of millions of people all over the world in shared endeavours, will only be realised if we tackle the major threats to it:

1. Increasingly intrusive government censorship;

2. Controls over content by traditional copyright holders;

3. The power of the new global media companies to shape the cloud to their own ends;

4. The vastly unequal opportunities open to people in the poorest parts of the world to be a part of cloud culture.

And finally

If my data, personal or creative, is stored in any cloud, or database for that matter, we need new laws to ensure that I have direct access to that data, the right to update it, and a personal copy of it.