{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title":"The Stack On Software and Sovereignty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780262029575","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","uuid":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title":"The Stack On Software and Sovereignty","normalized_title":"thestackonsoftwareandsovereignty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780262029575","isbns":["9780262029575"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":517,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/The%20Stack%20On%20Software%20and%20Sovereignty","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/search"},"page":{"printed_page":118,"pdf_page":134,"physical_index":134,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"2a574931e9a42d0e8112e7fc87a1e2f519c4799722e8c01878114081e3af7635"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"The pressure of that physical limit also pushes against the geoeconomics of the Internet backbone and private Cloud platforms, forcing how their development impacts on political geography as a whole. Instead of thinking of the Cloud as a bunch of individual private computers connected to data centers by big public pipe, it is perhaps better to think of any (at least partially) gated Cloud network as a single vast discontiguous computer, linking servers to browsers and back again, such that functions that may have once happened “ inside ” any one device now happens on the device ’ s “ out side, ” now on and in the network itself. Information input, storage, processing, display, and so on are handled by different components in the wider computer architecture, but when very fast optical links connect devices, supercomputers, dense populations, server farms, and enterprise clusters, they can delink and distribute that machine archi tecture, spreading it even across oceans. <sup>29</sup> But in practice, the Cloud (and any one Cloud platform) is much more than one shared network computer. Different actors (e.g., tel cos, states, standards bodies, hardware original equipment manufacturers, and cloud software platforms) all play different roles and control hardware and software appli cations in different ways and toward different ends. Internet backbone is generally provided and shared by tier 1 bandwidth providers (such as telcos), but one key trend is for very large platforms, such as Google, to bypass other actors and architect complete end-to-end networks, from browser, to fiber, to data center, such that information retrieval, composition, and analysis are consolidated and optimized on private loops. Consider that if Google ’ s own networks, both internal and external, were compared to others, they would represent one of the largest Internet service providers in the world, and by the time this sentence is published, they may very well be the largest. Google indexes the public Internet and mirrors as much of it as possible on its own servers so that it can serve search results and popular pages quickly to Users, regardless of where the original page may originally be coded, sourced, and hosted. It also maintains largescale networks for the distribution of its own User-facing content, such as YouTube videos, Gmail, and Search, and for the shuttling of the incredibly large “ copies ” of the Internet from one Google data center to another around the world. We could also then think of Google, the integrated platform architecture, as a kind of metacomputer that absorbs and processes data so as to maximize its own growth. When I log in to Gmail, my laptop becomes, for a moment, a peripheral device of that larger Google metamachine spread across the world. This ubiquity affects how data traffic itself is composed and managed. For example, software-defined networking (SDN) allows a network to prioritize, plan, track, and optimize the ideal routes of sets of packets in a way that is more sophisticated, composable, and responsive but less neutral and less dependent on political decisions made elsewhere. <sup>30</sup> In the long run, the investment and expertise in developing the infrastructure necessary to maintain the world ’ s largest consumer Cloud platforms may trend away from networks on which packets are sorted and routed in neutral, but not always reliable, pathways across shared pipes, and toward very large data providers and Cloud platforms, such as Google, or toll road developers, such as Comcast, controlling traffic over their own networks for their particular purposes. The future maturation of global Cloud platforms as quasi-independent geopolitical domains may be determined to a significant degree by their ability to deploy their own competitively effective, end-to-end cyberinfrastructures. <sup>31</sup> This will redraw the practical boundaries between open and curated computational services, public and private data, state and corporate geography, User and service, and Interface and infrastructure. The end result supports more ubiquitous, finer-grained supercomputation, but deals a severe blow to the social ideal of general-purpose computing, as hardware devices would also likely be further tuned to suit specific platform strategies, perhaps locking out others (see the discussion of the Apple Cloud Polis below). As we already see for financial networks, general Cloud-based geopolitical enclaves may appear as indirect functions of exclusive networks, monetized by providing premium services to those that can pay, including many that are traditionally managed by states, leaving other publics to wrestle over thirty-one flavors of net neutrality. As a global trend, this mode of computational production also bears the potential for a much more stratified mesh of enclaved Cloud experiences and a multitiered, more socially asymmetrical Cloud that provides premium services for some (including privacy , the ultimate Cloud service) and bare-bones services for others (their identities and interactions more exposed to the elements and to exploitation.) Still, the most pressing geopolitical design problems are those posed by what Cloud platforms already are and do. By examining some of our dominant platforms more closely — reading and interpreting them — we can perhaps predict what they will become, but, more important, perhaps steer their becoming as well.\n\n118\n\nCloud Layer","previous_page":117,"next_page":119}