Toward this, the ambition of Google ’ s Cloud Polis model already extends into the design and deployment of global infrastructures, and this interest is not a recent addition to the company ’ s founding vision, but in many ways precedes it. When Larry Page was a student at the University of Michigan, he was fascinated with the idea of an Ann Arbor monorail that would make local transportation more efficient. Google ’ s interest in transportation-as-platform extends, as discussed, into the Google driverless car project, now a focus of Sergey Brin ’ s interest and attention (more on these in the User chapter). One corollary of governing the Cloud as a global infrastructure for the integration of multiple economies under the rubric of rationalized information is a reframing of existing infrastructures as local instances for the application of a new information systems engineering program. Some of these (e.g., mass transportation, energy distribution, economic identity, cartography, banking) developed during the industrial era as platform mechanisms for large-scale states that may have been, at that time, among the only actors with sufficient capacity to deploy and defend these acts of sovereign inscription at continental scale. For better or worse, platforms such as Google may be positioned to offer parallel innovation of these same inscriptions now as private Cloudbased services. In that the ongoing effective sovereignty of modern states was to a degree underwritten by their management of local sections of global infrastructure, the realization of viable alternatives to this guarantee, now as core functions of The Stack, further complicates the boundaries between platform as state and state as platform.
Cloud Layer
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