Digital Cloud Balkanisation

[dewline]

Apparently, this is a thing to worry about. Especially with about a third of the planet trying to lurch back towards authoritarianism, fascism, "illiberal democracy", autocracy, etc. at whatever speed they can muster over the objections of the people they assert the right to master.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/17/1014967/balkanization-cloud-computing-bad-everyone/

To some extent, as users of Dreamwidth, we have to subscribe to this POV ourselves or lose some degree of contact with one another. And we definitely consider that international communication and community to be a public good.

How do we deal with this?

Comments

[agoodwinsmith]

I am unconvinced by this article. It just seems to be repeated exhortations that sovereign computing is bad and global computing is good. It is something that BC has been doing for a while: student application information cannot be stored on servers outside of Canada. This raises some problems since a lot of the snazzier application and portfolio systems are US based. We didn't really understand why storing such information outside of Canada was an issue, but student stuff is pretty sacred, so it was an easy lever that then covered any kind of information about Canadians for any purpose.

Also, the problem with using the metaphor of balkanization is that such fragmentation usually happens when a larger overarching system, such as the Ottoman Empire, Soviet Union, European Colonial Hegemonies fail and are no longer protecting while coercing. They are fueled by local people feeling crushed and sidelined by a larger system with its own priorities, but they only happen when the larger system fails.

(That's why I don't think Quebec as achieved liftoff - the protection by Canada is still at least equal to the squashing of Quebec concerns. Wexit still wants to be firmly attached to the Canadian teat, so it is still only a tantrum.)

So. Are the soverign concerns about data strong enough to break free? And is the overarching cloud thingie failing? We don't have a global management yet. We're working on it, but we don't have it yet. So each server in the cloud is effectively under the sovereignty of whereever its physical carcass is located. So it is still sovereignty against sovereignty.

Cries of "we gotta protect the little guy" sound as hollow in this article as they do on the lips of Doug Ford.

[frandroid]

I can't blame anyone for wanting their national data to be protected from the legal hands of foreign entities, especially as we know the U.S. and China have no qualms whatsoever in leveraging global jurisdiction when they can pull it off. (More rarely in China's case, but there are retaliatory measures, as we know.)

[thewayne]

People in the UK are falling out of EU data protection laws and back in to California's since they're no longer part of the EU in 11 days, except for half of Ireland.

It's a definite problem.