Amazon Web Services, Cloud Computing and Corporate Control

Technological developments often lead to new types of control and power. However, it is worth asking who, exactly, this new technology empowers. Much of the machine learning technologies have been deployed by corporations, and therefore individuals’ relationship to this technology has been mediated by how these corporations chose to use it. In this article, I explore some of the ways in which cloud computing technology may be giving corporations increased power over individuals’ property in the “cloud.”

Corporations have been peculiarly undertheorized in much of the contemporary literature on political thought, international relations and history. Even when scholars do take corporations into account, however, most do not generally treat corporations as competitors to the state or an alternative type of political entity that may genuinely threaten states’ power. Nevertheless, the history of corporations shows that they have always been political, and they are not always subservient to states.

Many prominent critiques of technology corporations have used American Gilded Age (1870-1900) monopoly corporations, such as Standard Oil, as a reference point, in part due to the current popularity of using an anti-monopoly approach to regulate Big Tech in the US and Europe. But while these monopoly corporations may have been powerful at that time, they were puny in comparison when compared to corporations in larger historical context.

Company-states like the British or Dutch East India Companies, for example, waged wars or negotiated peace with other companies or sovereigns, even when explicitly against the interests and orders of their home state. In colonial America, other corporations effectively turned into states (or, at least, colonies that became states). And while the British East India Company was ultimately enveloped into the British state, ushering in the British Empire, the American colonies wrested themselves from British control and establish their own state. As Harold Laski noted, “corporations have a curious habit of attempting perpetually to escape from the rigid bonds in which they have been encased . . . like some Frankenstein, they show ingratitude to their creators.”

Still today, however, the paucity of theory around the concept of the corporation has left us struggling to make sense of the enormous powers that corporations, especially technology corporations, wield and that states or other political entities may ultimately be unable to control.

One area in which contemporary technology corporations are increasingly exerting new forms of power is “in the cloud.” Cloud computing corporations effectively control individuals’ property, and states have done very little to protect or regulate it. Cloud computing is - essentially - using other people’s computers. For example, an individual may use a service like Dropbox, Google Documents or Apple iCloud to host a digital file. The user thus owns the digital file, but it is stored or hosted on the physical servers of the cloud company and uses the internet to access their digital property. Industrial cloud computing companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Alibaba’s Aliyun allow entire corporations or organizations to store massive amounts of digital property in external data centres, which includes both discrete files (such as a word document) and the software and platforms necessary to host more extensive digital infrastructure (such as an email service).

One implication of this control is that cloud computing corporations could prevent you from accessing your property that is stored on their servers. For example, an individual who had been suspended from Facebook after his account had been misidentified as a bot told the New York Times that the inability to access his property in the Facebook cloud was devastating; all of his photos of his brother, who had recently died, had been stored on Facebook. Similarly, when AWS suspended the alternative media site Parler from its services after it failed to regulate content on its platform in the wake of the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill, it effectively caused the entire site to “go dark.”

Individuals who use a cloud custodian to store their personal files may find it easy to export and transfer their property to alternate cloud custodians, such as Dropbox and Apple iCloud. However, larger institutions, such as businesses or governments, who use industrial cloud computing providers such as AWS or Microsoft Azure, may find that the cloud custodian’s infrastructure has become thoroughly integrated with their own digital property, resulting in “lock-in.” For example, if a company like Netflix contracts with AWS, they may use both AWS data centres as well as an AWS platform, such as an operating system. Netflix may then use this operating system to build their own communications software, as an internal email service. Subsequently, Netflix may find it impossible to transfer their digital property to an alternative cloud custodian because what constitutes “their” property (the emails) has become enmeshed in the cloud custodians’ infrastructure (the operating system needed to run the email software). It may be impossible - or, at least, very difficult - for a cloud custodian to “give back” or release the digital property to its owners if requested because the property itself requires the infrastructure of the cloud to exist or be accessible.

Furthermore, while the cloud often hosts critical infrastructure and property of states’ citizens or corporations, it also hosts the infrastructure of the state itself. Governments around the world have either fully or partially migrated operations to the cloud. While it is difficult to determine precise numbers, it is clear that Amazon’s AWS dominates government cloud computing, claiming to host over 6,500 government agencies including the CIA, NSA, NASA, FDA, CDC, and SEC. A recent cloud computing contract between UK spy agencies and AWS has raised concerns around “the potential risks of outsourcing critical elements of UK national security infrastructure to non-UK-based companies.” If companies like Target and Netflix are worried about using AWS, should state governments like the UK and US be worried about their dependency on cloud computing providers? If a cloud computing corporation hosts the property and digital infrastructure of a state’s agencies in the cloud, then they may certainly be “too big to fail.”