Yes there is still more ambrosia, err cloud, to consider. I will keep this one brief. My colleague, Patrick Ryan, was a scholar in residence and now an Adjunct Professor in the Interdisciplinary Telecommunications Program at CU Boulder. He also works with me on Google’s policy team. Ronak Merchant, Sarah Falvey, and Patrick have a piece about cloud policy called Regulation of the Cloud in India in the Journal of Internet Law. The paper goes into some telecomm history, looks at some business cases for the cloud, and makes some policy claims:
Because computation in the cloud is no different from use of the Internet itself, it is not readily feasible or practical to cage and confine data flows within the cloud in a way that is substantially different from the flow of worldwide information generally.
For this reason, regulatory frameworks should not be sui generis or custom tailored for the cloud and, instead, should leverage or update existing laws that are already in place. This article proposes a regulatory model for the cloud and shows how this model can be applied to India.
What is that proposal? Read the paper to find out! (Seriously, the history stuff was worth the read alone for me). Hint: Although somewhat India specific, the basic idea is that many regulations are already in place and so proposed new ones should be careful for “In the second largest democracy in the world, it is imperative that the free flow of information be preserved.”