Much of modern life depends on cloud computing. From underpinning critical infrastructure, such as airports and telecommunications, to powering essential services that citizens rely on – including healthcare, banking and social security – cloud infrastructure is indispensable. And yet, despite its societal importance, cloud computing is tightly controlled by a handful of monopolistic corporations that leverage this control to entrench their dominance and distort fair competition and innovation across the digital economy. This includes the nascent AI sector, where Big Tech’s control of cloud infrastructure gives it a major advantage in the training, running and distribution of AI systems. 

This concentration of power and capacity among a few private corporations poses a threat not only to competition and innovation, but also to the security, stability and resilience of our societies. The July 2024 CrowdStrike IT outage, which heavily impacted Microsoft’s cloud and IT infrastructure and inflicted over $5 billion in economic damage, underscored the dangers of our dependence on highly concentrated and poorly understood technological chokepoints. The risks that this dependence poses to state sovereignty have also become clearer than ever in today’s fraught geopolitical environment, where governments are increasingly willing to wield technological assets as a tool of economic and diplomatic coercion. 

In this webinar, the Open Markets Institute will bring together leading experts to discuss these issues as well as potential solutions, drawing on our upcoming report: Engineering the Cloud Commons: A Blueprint for Resilient, Secure, and Open Digital Infrastructure. We will explore the bold steps that are needed to create a true cloud commons, from public utility regulation and structural separation to investment in digital public infrastructure.

FEATURED PANELISTS:

Amba Kak, Co-Executive Director, AI Now institute
Paris Marx, Journalist and Host of the Tech Won’t Save Us Podcast
Maaike Okano-Heijmans, Head of Tech and Digitalisation Programme, Clingendael Institute
Ganesh Sitaraman, Professor of Law, Vanderbilt University
Matt Davies, Economic and Social Policy Lead, Ada Lovelace Institute
Ariel (Eli) Levite, Senior Fellow, Nuclear Policy Program, Technology and International Affairs Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Solange Viegas Dos Reis, Chief Legal Officer, OVHcloud
Trey Herr, Senior Director, Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council
Paul de Bijl, Chief Economist at the Netherlands Authority for Consumers & Markets