Lost In the Cloud

Colonel Korn writes "Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain suggests in an Op-Ed piece that the seemingly inevitable move toward the often locked-down cloud is stifling innovation and threatening our privacy: '... many software developers who once would have been writing whatever they wanted for PCs are simply developing less adventurous, less subversive, less game-changing code under the watchful eyes of Facebook and Apple. If the market settles into a handful of gated cloud communities whose proprietors control the availability of new code, the time may come to ensure that their platforms do not discriminate. Such a demand could take many forms, from an outright regulatory requirement to a more subtle set of incentives — tax breaks or liability relief — that nudge companies to maintain the kind of openness that earlier allowed them a level playing field on which they could lure users from competing, mighty incumbents. We've only just begun to measure this problem, even as we fly directly into the cloud. That's not a reason to turn around. But we must make sure the cloud does not hinder the creation of revolutionary software that, like the Web itself, can seem esoteric at first but utterly necessary later.'"

Re:repeat after me

[Em Emalb]

the cloud is not taking over everything, not everyone is going to give up their computers for a network appliance that depends on the cloud to do anything and everything, the cloud will at best become useful for a few people but not everyone

Government

[endianx]

Nothing says innovation like government regulation!

Re:Internet Hype Machine

[middlemen]

Somehow, I don't think that Facebook is going to be the technology that drives computing forard...

Someone please tell that to the Facebook developers. That site moves slower than the clouds in the sky, giving a new meaning to cloud computing.

Re:So lets see here...

[Garrett Fox]

"This new technology of the Internet is promising, but we're worried that some aspects of it are going to cause problems. Let's get Congress to impose taxes and regulations to bludgeon the new industry into the shape we think it should take, then let lobbyists and the English majors in Congress be the ones to decide what direction the technology takes."