Why The Cloud Should Be a Public Utility

Perhaps no technology underpins more the everyday functioning of our increasingly digital world than cloud computing. We rely on the cloud every day to access government, healthcare and educational services. We access our government benefits, file taxes, schedule doctor’s appointments, bank online and access educational materials all through the cloud.

We also increasingly depend on the cloud to communicate with each other. Where we once relied on the telephone system and federated self-hosted email servers, now millions of Americans communicate daily over cloud-based apps, such as web-based email services like Gmail, WhatsApp, Messenger and Zoom. And now, with the advent of artificial intelligence, nearly all Americans use either AI-specific products, such as AI chatbots, or AI-enabled services such as social media, weather forecasting apps or shopping websites. All of these products and services require processing powers, not only to train the underlying AI models, but also to deploy them to end users.

What “the cloud” even is remains obscure to many people. There are many different service offerings and business models in the industry, but it is most simply understood as companies that offer computing resources — access to big storage servers and processing power — as a service. Cloud providers build, rent or manage the physical infrastructure to do all the computing, and then sell access to it to all the many individuals and businesses that need it.