The Future of the Internet...Is In the Cloud

Cross-posted from SocialGovernment, a blog covering how government is adapting to Web 2.0, to which I am contributor. 

The future of the Internet is in the cloud, and it has implications for every sector of our society, especially government and business.

On Wednesday January 20 the Brookings Institution hosted a discussion on Cloud Computing including a keynote address from Brad Smith, Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Microsoft Corporation. Smith unveiled a policy proposal from Microsoft which urged Congress to consider new legislation to regulate the cloud.

“We need a national conversation about how to build confidence in the cloud,” Smith said.

Defined simply, cloud computing is “computing delivered as a service over the Internet.” A national survey conducted for Microsoft by Penn, Schoen and Berland found that while 75% of Americans don’t know what cloud computing is, 90% use it.

Gmail and Google Apps are an example: the data do not reside on any one hard drive or tied to a single physical server. Instead, a user can access the data wherever, whenever, with an Internet connection. As more industries move data to the cloud, they are balancing the flexibility, reliability and choice of cloud computing with real concerns about privacy, security and legality.

The survey reflected that sentiment, while a majority of the general population and  86% of senior business leaders are “excited about the potential” of cloud computing, security and data privacy are concerns of more than 90% of those surveyed. And while there is growing confidence in the cloud (think about how many Americans use it for online banking, for example), there are also new inherent challenges.

The first is jurisdiction: Who is in charge? The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986 would seem to extend to the cloud, but the law is terribly out of date and has not been modernized to keep pace with the development of the Internet. As an example, ECPA extends greater privacy protections to emails stored for less than 180 days than those stored longer. Obviously this is a throwback to the days in the 80s when keeping e-mails for long periods of time was burdensome and uncommon- but it is clearly not the norm today.

In the same vein, does the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, protection from unreasonable search and seizure, extend to the cloud? Do users have a reasonable expectation of privacy or do they relinquish that when using a third party (i.e. the cloud) to store private date? Many insist that the Courts must extend Fourth Amendment protection to the cloud, however they have not to date and there currently exists no legal precedent for such an argument.

While the US courts may soon consider the issue of constitutional protection, businesses that choose to host their data centers off shore raise the issue of international sovereignty and jurisdiction of the cloud. Smith says that Microsoft supports an international treaty defining access to the cloud but is cognizant that such an action in the near future is unlikely, and that in the interim it will be up to the private sector to make critical choices about the future of the cloud. 

Vivek Kundra, the Obama Administration’s Chief Information Officer, has spoken of the potential of cloud computing to increase access to data within government by, reducing time spent on procedure and increasing time spent on achieving an agencies fundamental mission and goals. He has estimated that the cost savings could be as great as 1/10^th. In a speech last year, Kundra chided what he sees as the focus of government IT on infrastructure maintenance rather than deploying technical tools to achieve goals.

At its core, the promise of cloud computing comes in giving users greater choice and access, in giving businesses greater flexibility and connectivity and giving government greater efficiency and transparency. Microsoft has introduced the Cloud Computing Advancement Act, which will continue a national conversation about the future of the cloud and the future of the Internet.

More information:

Read an op/ed about the Cloud Computing Advancement Act by Brad Smith in the Huffington Post

Politico also covered the issue this week in an article, “Microsoft Urges Greater Oversight”