Cloud Policy: A History of Regulating Pipelines, Platforms, and Data

Introduction

Here we have the bare bones of our future. Let us now fill in the skeleton with living flesh and see what sort of creature it is that we have created.

—Douglas Parkhill, The Challenge of the Computer Utility, 1966

We can no longer permit technological innovation to just happen, and then attempt to regulate away the adverse effects.

—US Office of Telecommunications Policy, 1974

Cloud Policy: Genealogy of a Regulatory Crisis

Every time we use the cloud, we are engaging with more than one hundred years of policy history. We have reached a point in this history where we can no longer afford to ignore its lessons.

Policy is a gateway through which all media and its infrastructure must pass, and that includes the sociotechnical systems that are together known as the cloud. This infrastructure that allows us to work remotely, send emails, share on social media, watch or listen to streaming content, bank, shop, or attend class online is also the arena where many of our contemporary rights are being adjudicated. The cloud is now a primary locus of governance for individual and collective privacy, speech rights, information access, and data security. It has opened new terrain for industry competition. These material technological systems and immaterial spaces are also where sovereignty is being asserted and redefined. It is where our attention must turn in order to preserve the digital civil liberties that have endured decades of politicized attacks. To post a tweet, navigate using Google maps, or store documents on Dropbox is to be imbricated in this expansive policy landscape and its myriad forces of control.

The cloud is a vast ecosystem of privately owned infrastructure that stores and distributes data for remote access. It is reliant on a global network of servers, the pipelines that link those servers to Internet users, and the platforms hosting digital engagement. This infrastructure represents power struggles over issues ranging from the territories covered by its physical networks to the legality of a government surveilling its own citizens. All these conflicts, some of which have their roots in the nineteenth century, are deeply inscribed in the regulation of cloud infrastructure today. Indeed, the long arc of cloud policy began generations before the arrival of the Internet or social media. This history is bound to those of our railroads, highways, and even the laws of the sea. It has been informed and influenced by regulations designed for nineteenth- and twentieth-century media, including the telegraph, the telephone, radio, and broadcast television. A historical orientation reveals how the cloud as we now experience it has been shaped by more than a century’s worth of cultural and political negotiations over the practices of media and communication technologies, some of which no longer exist. It further exposes the true scope of how the public has been failed in the process.

What follows is a policy genealogy focused on some of the most legible and critical elements of cloud infrastructure: Internet distribution pipelines, digital platforms (particularly those controlled by the dominant Big Tech companies), and of course, data, which serves as the raw material of the cloud. This also necessarily includes the data centers all over the globe that function as the cloud’s storage facilities. These infrastructural elements of the cloud are rarely considered holistically in the process of policymaking. Yet, they coexist in an intricate web of relationships that has evolved incrementally over time, along with the technologies themselves and their user cultures. Examining these dimensions of cloud infrastructure as a collective site of policymaking is imperative for a properly scaled view of the massive regulatory challenge that we are now facing in the twenty-first century. It is also essential for understanding the cloud as a multilayered infrastructure of democracy, albeit one currently in crisis.

I employ a genealogical approach in order to reveal the many forgotten patterns, conflicts, conditions, and decisions that have helped create contemporary cloud policy. As David Garland has written, such a process is motivated less by the desire to understand the past and more by a critical concern to understand the present. It aims to trace the forces that gave birth to our present-day practices and to identify the historical conditions upon which they still depend. Its point is not to think historically about the past but rather to use historical materials to rethink the present.¹ Accordingly, Cloud Policy concentrates on the relational values of contemporary infrastructure regulation and how these paradigms have changed over time, animating the forces that have led us to this point, along with what was previously imagined, what might have been, and what has been left behind in the process. In so doing, I hope the necessary and restorative interventions become clear, together with the alternative policy values and decisions that were once possible and can be again.

Throughout this history, there have been numerous dramatic power shifts affecting the regulation and provision of what would eventually become cloud infrastructure. For example, many of the original promises of openness and decentralization related to the Internet have fallen victim to the forces of privatization and monopoly capital. The role of regulators has been diminished by consolidated corporate power; much of cloud policy is now dictated by Big Tech cloud providers, either directly through terms of service and trans-industrial agreements, or indirectly through their networks of influence and lobbying muscle. Private sector values have increasingly determined public policy across all industries, which tracks with the global ascent of neoliberalism over the past four decades, and the attendant rise of antidemocratic political movements worldwide.² As Shoshana Zuboff has written, the road to our current predicament is littered with terms such as the open internet and connectivity being quietly harnessed to a market process in which individuals are definitively cast as the means to others’ market ends.³ And yet, historically, the stewards of media policy were once devoted to safeguarding the public interest as it relates to industry competition, pricing, and service; defending personal privacy; and forestalling the profiteering of private corporations on the backs of public utilities. This is no longer in the realm of expectations for US citizens. In fact, the protracted decline of such public values is now a defining feature of cloud policy’s evolution.

While cloud policy is inherently global, this book is focused primarily on the history of US infrastructure policy; however, crucial connections to and conflicts with other nations, regions, and policy regimes across the globe are addressed throughout. The varying approaches to privacy and data security among the US and the European Union, China, and Russia are some of the many examples. These growing points of disconnection have created geopolitical, financial, industrial, and moral/ethical crises of their own, on top of the specific policy predicaments they represent. The issues raised by such a history are vast—they point to the evolving role of the state in this regulatory arena, the increasing power of corporate gatekeepers and private sector governance, the fragility of civil liberties in the digital age, and the weight of policy’s path dependencies on contemporary cloud infrastructure.

Scholarship across a wide stretch of disciplinary divides and areas of study have influenced this project. At its core, Cloud Policy is aligned with the ideals of fostering equality, democracy, and an informed citizenry. However, most formal policy debates and decisions are dominated by social scientists utilizing quantified logics and methods.⁴ It is rare to ever find a humanist in the room. These conventions often preclude qualitative and conceptual arguments from being foregrounded in crucial deliberations and diminish the importance of historical perspectives regarding the inherent civic and social functions of infrastructure. However, the views and voices that emanate from the humanities are also fundamental to policy formation and reform. They are central to identifying the nagging creep of tyranny in this ecosystem, and to evaluating the sacrifices we make for mobility, connectivity, and convenience. Humanistic traditions help to reveal the vulnerabilities baked in to our desire to share, as well as the personal, collective, and cultural costs of corporate and state surveillance across time. Their inclusion is vital to the regulatory calculus. Cloud Policy is inspired by and written with that ethos.

Work by whistleblowers, journalists, policymakers, media historians, legal scholars, privacy experts, and computer scientists have all informed this research. My interviews with public interest advocates, regulators, industry executives, technologists, and lawyers have been essential to understanding this policy landscape. In the process of writing this book, I also analyzed many decades’ worth of case law, government hearings, investigations, and reports, as well as formal policy deliberations and documents. I utilized additional archival sources including personal papers and court records, as well as terms of service and licensing agreements, annual reports ranging from AT&T’s in 1907 to Google’s in 2021, and other legal filings from infrastructure providers, media companies, and Big Tech corporations.

The many interrelated laws, processes, regulations, and ideologies animating this history collectively represent a domain I am calling cloud policy. Cloud policy encompasses a combination of formal laws and regulations as well as the larger sphere of informal practices and corporate dictates that have shaped the policy terrain for pipeline, platform, and data infrastructure. This includes a complex set of political relationships and industrial protocols, as policy is not just what we read on a page. It also exists in layered, material and immaterial operations that result in the built environment, structures of power, and cultural values. Accordingly, cloud policy also extends to

1) a set of sociotechnical relations across pipelines, platforms, and data;

2) geopolitical agreements and tension/collaboration at multiple levels of governance that shape the interaction of these infrastructures in a global context;

3) social norms and user cultures affecting how the cloud is utilized; and

4) the ever-expanding partnership between the public and private sector.

Thus, I approach cloud policy as a space of historical investigation and analysis, with the central concerns of tracing how public interest and democratic principles have been progressively eroded. The cloud’s inherent conveniences and affordances are by-products of policy, as are the personal and collective costs it extracts. Our current conditions were never inevitable, and this book chronicles many of the key decisions behind their construction and the formation of policy now governing cloud infrastructure.

Cloud Policy further elaborates the principle of regulatory hangover, or the conceptual and practical inability of policy to keep pace with technological advances and cultural change. This is the inevitable and long-standing consequence of media and communications technologies evolving far beyond their policy foundations, particularly those foundations devoted to the protection of the public interest. Over time, as policy regimes historically designed to preserve values such as diversity, universal access, public welfare, and competition have changed, these ideals have been progressively forfeited, casualties of a protracted regulatory hangover that we are still living with today.

The term regulatory hangover was first described by economist Harvey J. Levin in 1973 as the euphemism which refers to the failure of the regulatory framework to respond to technological change.⁵ In his analysis of the 1971 Sloan Commission report on cable television and its nascent growth, Levin warned that the danger for regulatory hangover with respect to this burgeoning medium was considerable.⁶ The director of the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy (OTP), Clay Whitehead, sounded similar alarms just a year later. Also focusing on cable, Whitehead and the Cabinet Committee on Cable Communications urged President Nixon in 1974 to take note of the emergent regulatory hangover happening with regard to new networks of media distribution. The committee addressed the need to adapt policy as media technologies transformed, but their instruction received little notice at the time. The changes in cable technology and in the economic and social importance of cable should have been accompanied by changes in the public policy that govern its regulation, the committee wrote, yet, the regulators’ perception of the cable medium has lagged far behind its evolving reality.⁷

This dynamic is also referred to as regulatory lag, and it has persisted in media industries since the advent of radio. However, because of the speed of technological innovation and change in the twenty-first century, it has become a bona fide crisis in the digital, cloud-based era. As former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has noted, When looking at the long arc, one has to recognize that the kind of assumptions that policymakers have historically made don’t work anymore. Wheeler connects this point to an observation Madeleine Albright has made regarding diplomacy, and applies it to technology: Every time a 21st century issue comes up, we define it in 20th century terms and propose 19th century solutions.⁸

Cloud policy affects everything from access to the Internet and data security to personal privacy and freedom of expression. Safeguarding these rights and principles in a policy space that is simultaneously local, national, regional, and global has created challenges that often defy existing regulations and traditional geographies of control. As a result, this massive assemblage of laws and policies governing cloud infrastructure is rife with conflicts that are steadily proliferating. The scope of such conflicts has been addressed by scholars including Sandra Braman, in the context of information policy,⁹ and Julie Cohen, in the framework of informational capitalism.¹⁰ Others have tackled more sector-specific dimensions of cloud policy, presenting a regulatory landscape in flux that grows more unruly every day.

Ithiel de Sola Pool’s work is also resonant here. His seminal book Technologies of Freedom (1983) forecast many of the regulatory crises precipitated by new technologies and media convergence. He argued that our policy failures are often those of regulatory imagination and criticized the manner in which policymakers applied familiar analogies from the past to their lay image of the new technology, creat[ing] a partly old, partly new structure of rights and obligations. The telegraph was analogized to railroads, the telephone to the telegraph, and cable television to broadcasting.¹¹ Herein lies a foundational problem of cloud policy, and a failure of imagination that has proven devastating to the public interest. In addition to the familiar analogies, the historical rules, definitions, classifications, and doctrines applied to cloud infrastructure are inadequate at best, destructive at worst, when it comes to creating policy for the digital era. The endurance of outmoded legal constructs and the abandonment of vital political commitments along the way have led us to a moment in which nearly all power over the public sphere has been given to a very small number of private entities. Cloud Policy thus offers a reconsideration of de Sola Pool’s concerns and warnings as they have manifested in the regulatory environment for twenty-first-century pipelines, platforms, and data.

Speaking to many of the conceptual threads explored throughout this book, Tung-Hui Hu’s Prehistory of the Cloud (2015) addresses the ways in which power is also embedded in the core metaphors and imaginations of the cloud as fantasy. In so doing, Hu investigates the administration and design of railway networks and fiber-optic routes, sewer systems, and military bunkers, and interrogates artistic visualizations of the cloud for the ways they allow us to think through historical problems of power and visibility.¹² Both the inherent invisibility and manufactured visibility of the cloud have had a dramatic impact on how we understand and value its infrastructure. Eventually, those evaluations translate to policy—and, in turn, lived experience. Examining the law and policy that emerges alongside government, corporate, and individual attempts to render this infrastructure intelligible is another way to access the dramatic stakes of cloud policy. It helps to reveal what Hu calls the long term consequences of the cloud from the fog of the seductive ‘now.’ ¹³

In this effort, Cloud Policy brings together many disciplinary perspectives that have thus far remained largely siloed in their respective fields of law, policy, economics, and media studies, among others. The myriad histories that constitute cloud policy are also considered in relation to one another, as this domain is shared with that of the phone company, the broadcast and cable industries, Big Tech platforms, and Hollywood studios, along with the many human agents within, including their users and audiences. These institutions and industries have been shaped by obscene phone calls, organized crime wiretaps, wars, climate change, and civic protest. Their power is mediated by lawyers, judges, content producers, computer scientists, and the advocacy community, as well as by policymakers and regulators from the local to the global. The indelible traces of these many interconnected legacies loom large. This book shines a light on their formative imprints and long-forgotten lessons, all of which are still alive and well in the terrain of contemporary cloud policy.

Designing the Cloud

Although the first use of the term cloud computing is often attributed to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt in a 2006 speech to an industry audience,¹⁴ or to an internal Compaq document addressing networked computer services in November 1996,¹⁵ the underlying concept was first explored many decades earlier. The idea and potential for networked computing as a distributed, regulated infrastructural public resource was already being considered in the 1960s. In 1961, MIT and Stanford computer scientist John McCarthy imagined a future in which computing may someday be organized as a public utility just as the telephone system is a public utility.¹⁶ The concept of computer utilities—arguably the original term for the cloud—described a networked system that allowed many users to access the same mainframe computer through remote communications links.¹⁷ Five years later, Douglas Parkhill’s prophetic book The Challenge of the Computer Utility (1966) took up the concept and described what cloud computing might actually look like. Parkhill wrote about the features of a general-purpose public computer utility for which no upper limit would exist for either the numbers and types of tasks to be performed or the numbers of customers to be serviced. In fact, as such a utility grew it might eventually embrace the entire nation and service not only industrial, government and business customers, but also private homes, until the personal computer console became as commonplace as the telephone.¹⁸ He also envisioned that such a utility would, as is customary, be subject to government regulation and other customs reserved for industries bound by the law of public service undertakings.¹⁹

Computer utility services were also referred to as time sharing technology, and, according to Paul Edwards, by 1967 some twenty firms, including IBM and General Electric, had established computing service bureaus in dozens of cities.²⁰ At the same time, the US Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and its ARPANET project was funded to design and build a network, linking together multiple computers for data transmission across a wide geographical stretch through telephone lines. This ultimately spawned the Internet, and some of the pipeline infrastructure for the cloud. Early innovators and designers of the ARPANET actually argued that the network should be treated as a computer utility, and be held responsible for the level of reliability provided by the power company and the phone company.²¹ Plantin, et al. have noted that this ideology endured throughout the Internet’s developmental period, one marked by heavy government investment, sponsored first by the US Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency and then by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) in the public interest. In the 1980s, the NSF forced the broad provision of Internet connections in order to permit scientists at less well-resourced institutions to share time on the costly supercomputers it purchased for a few major research centers—exactly the ‘computer utility’ model.²²

Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) cofounder Mitch Kapor held as a motto, Architecture is politics.²³ This imagined connection between design, power, and control is evident in the blueprint for the ARPANET. It was created as an open network, without any filters, censors, or intermediaries between sender and receiver. The decentralized, nonhierarchical design of the ARPANET—especially remarkable given the formative role of the military in its design—echoes the paradigm of democracy’s decentralized power and the values that system of government was intended to represent. Early US cloud infrastructure contained safeguards inherent in its end-to-end design that theoretically insulated it from various forms of corruption and control, much like a system of checks and balances. Such structures were originally envisioned as bulwarks against monopoly power or centralized authority. However, as Benjamin Peters has argued in his formative study of early Soviet efforts to construct a national computer network, there is no such inherent connection between the designs of technological and political systems.²⁴ Instead of these imagined analogs of utopian instinct, Peters explains that such direct correlations between political and technical systems, between computer network and formal state and social structure, are misleading because they neglect actual political practices and their significant costs and consequences.²⁵ This caveat has indeed borne out across the history of cloud policy.

The network was initially switched on in October 1969, when the first nodes became operational and UCLA was connected to the Stanford Research Institute. In the next two months, two other nodes were added: UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah. Figure 0.1 shows one of the initial sketches of this originary, four-node primitive cloud or, as one of the project’s earliest network engineers J. C. R. Licklider called it, the Intergalactic Computer Network.²⁶

Figure 0.1

ARPA Network four node map.

Credit: Reprinted with the permission of the Computer History Museum.

With this vision in place, wires controlled by AT&T began networking computers in the US. Surprisingly, while AT&T was the state-sanctioned monopoly provider of telephone lines into the home, the company missed its chance to be the pipeline provider for the Internet in the 1970s. Their lack of foresight and inability to imagine the ARPANET computing network as a commercial communications utility was rather stunning, particularly as all users who accessed the Internet in its earliest days used fixed-line connections. However, when members of the ARPANET team took the project to AT&T in 1972 to see if the telecommunications giant wanted to become the Internet’s new operator, the company declined, failing to see the network’s potential at that time.²⁷ Furthermore, AT&T was not about to compete with itself in the arena of long-distance service.²⁸ Paul Baran was the RAND Corporation think-tank engineer who largely designed the distributed network based on packet switching that became the Internet’s foundation. Baran had lobbied AT&T to adopt such a system in its capacity as the communications contractor for the Department of Defense back in 1965. AT&T also refused then, insisting its own network was superior and the innovations of packet switching were incompatible with the Bell System.²⁹

In the 1980s, Kōji Kobayashi, former president and then chairman of Japan’s Nippon Electric Company³⁰ wrote a prophetic book about how computing and communication—what he termed C&C—would merge into a single infrastructure for information processing. Computers and Communications was originally published in Japan in 1985 and then by the MIT Press in 1986. His vision also included a wish that the concept of C&C will eventually bring happiness and prosperity to all humankind by transcending artificial boundaries on earth and creating a global society that went beyond national borders.³¹ Shortly thereafter, personal computers became affordable enough and storage dropped in price so that one could rely on individual networks. Eventually, servers and traffic scaled up sharply in the late 1990s, and by the mid-2000s, the computer utility model, or C&C, would reemerge as the cloud (minus the happiness and prosperity for all).

Usage of the cloud skyrocketed in the 2010s with the industry around it expanding as rapidly as the digital economy. Worldwide spending on public cloud services was estimated to be close to $600 billion in 2023, which is a hundred times what it was just fifteen years earlier.³² The global cloud storage market alone is projected to reach over $300 billion by 2028.³³ However, without corporate funding and development, the cloud would not function. The three largest providers of cloud services in the world—Amazon, Google, and Microsoft—have spent enormous sums on data centers and related public-facing infrastructure. These investments have paid off handsomely, returning billions of dollars every year and, in Amazon’s case, nearly three-quarters of the company’s operating profit.³⁴ While the Defense Department funded much of the earliest work on experimental computer networks in the 1960s that eventually became the Internet, most of the infrastructural advancement that has followed for pipelines, platforms, and data storage has been accomplished with private capital. Such public-private partnerships have existed throughout media and telecommunications history, but the private sector has been in the driver’s seat since the advent of the digital era. The cloud that they built now serves practically all industries, including banking and financial services, transportation, telecommunications, agriculture, manufacturing, retail, health care, and of course media and entertainment.

The media sector has undeniably been transformed by the cloud and the Netflix effect—the growth of direct-to-consumer streaming services and the attendant demand for instant access to any and all forms of media. This cloud-fueled dynamic was credited for motivating Disney’s $71 billion+ purchase of 21st Century Fox in 2019, and AT&T’s short-lived $85 billion takeover of Time Warner in 2018 (quickly resold to Discovery in 2022), in the all-out arms race to keep up with digital content companies such as Netflix, Amazon, and Apple. Eliminating the middleman from the distribution chain and utilizing proprietary platforms to reach viewers directly has also threatened traditional cable companies, as the pace of cord cutting has picked up. In the US, the number of households that leave cable subscriptions behind increases each year; currently it hovers around 24 percent and is projected to approach 50 percent by 2024.³⁵ Moreover, the born-digital media platforms are worth, in some cases, ten to twenty times what their Hollywood studio counterparts are.³⁶ These data-based companies are also outpacing their studio-bound rivals in terms of spending and production volume in the digital distribution wars. Their dominance has played a central role in the formation of cloud policy.

Visualizing the Cloud

The exponential growth in cloud usage took off while most people still did not understand what cloud computing was, or recognize how much they were actually utilizing the cloud themselves.³⁷ That suits the tech industry just fine, because, as Tung-Hui Hu has written, the more one learns about [the cloud], the more one realizes just how fragile it is.³⁸ This fragility results in incessant global data breaches—an inevitable fact of life in a cloud-based society—affecting hundreds of millions of users every year, including those resulting from high-profile hacks of major studios, social media platforms, and governments. Moreover, cyber warfare and malicious attacks by individuals and state actors is expanding at an astronomical pace. The regulatory inconsistencies that exist in the global expanse of cloud policy only serve to further undermine the security of its pipelines, platforms, and data.

Widespread awareness of this infrastructural fragility would quickly unravel the peaceful metaphor that cloud imagery creates and depends on for the necessary user buy-in to occur. Without marketing wizardry, it would be quite challenging to convince users to allow their personal data and important documents and communication histories to be housed in somebody else’s computer at a corporate-controlled warehouse in an undisclosed location. Visions of emails, work materials, and TV episodes residing somewhere celestial, floating in space and readily pulled back down to earth for viewing on demand is a more comfortable and calming fantasy. However, the reality of remote data storage and distribution is much less sublime. In fact, it is very earthbound, material, and precarious. It is also fraught with policy landmines to navigate on both domestic and global scales. This infrastructure could have just as easily been referred to collectively as the closet, the storage locker, the trunk, the attic, the barn, the vault, the warehouse, the cellar, the stash, the depository, the garage, the safe, the silo, or the shed. Or, for that matter, it could have been called the sky, the air, the vapor, or the beyond. But the thought of putting your digital life in the vapor or the shed does not deliver the same sense of peace and tranquility inspired by leaving it in the cloud.

Therefore, obscuring the very infrastructure on which it depends became integral to the cloud industry’s success. Echoing the arguments about infrastructural literacy and practices of concealment made by Lisa Parks³⁹, the less the public understands about the pipelines, platforms, servers, facilities, and legal paradigms that their data travels through, the easier it is for people to hand over their personal information the cloud’s unidentifiable and mysterious stewards. For the user, such data is better off in God’s habitat as John Durham Peters has called the marvelous clouds that signify the glory of the divine presence⁴⁰ than in a chilly underground bunker full of computers run by massive global tech conglomerates.

Figure 0.2

Ethereal cloud promises.

Credit: Photo by Louise M. Kolff

Figure 0.3

Servers in Douglas County, Georgia, data center.

Credit: Google

This transformation of server farms from hulking storage facilities into attendants of the sublime requires imbuing the material (servers, wires, cables, buildings) with immaterial qualities, and the immaterial (digital data, the concept of remote storage) with easily recognizable and nonthreatening features. Hu refers to this as an example of the computing science term virtualization—a technique for turning real things into logical objects, such as a warehouse of data storage servers rearticulated as a cloud drive.⁴¹ It allows for the projection of the cultural fantasy, as Hu elaborates, of the cloud as something inexhaustible, limitless, invisible.⁴² As cloud infrastructure is reimagined in the form of consumer-friendly constructs and metaphors, that imbued sense of unlimited abundance also works to blur the larger ecological and economic implications of the industry at large. Asta Vonderau, for one, has written about this development, explaining that dematerialized images of the cloud obscure its infrastructural and industrial materialities as well as its problematic social and environmental consequences, including the enormous electricity and water needs of data centres, the increasing pollution through waste heat, or the low number of job opportunities the cloud industry offers to local communities.⁴³

The practice of virtualizing and visualizing the immaterial components of media goes back to wireless telegraphy and the advent of radio. In his analysis of the radio spectrum and the meeting point between materiality and the imaginary, Ghislain Thibault has pointed to the imagery of the lightning bolt and wave as instrumental in shaping the social meanings of wireless technology and representing values such as progress or sound transmission.⁴⁴ The US National Telecommunications and Information Administration map of the radio spectrum represents the visual transformation of the spectrum into specific parcels for regulatory purposes (see figures 0.4 and 0.5). Thomas Streeter has written about how Guglielmo Marconi’s newly discovered ether that disseminated radio signals was treated as a space that might be usefully ‘bounded,’ and thus given some of the characteristics of property.⁴⁵ The spectrum—which could also be understood as the original platform—thus became a space of economic exchange folded into the logics of corporate liberalism,⁴⁶ an ideology that has continued to guide the approach to regulating media infrastructure into the cloud age.

Figure 0.4

Radio spectrum map, 1928.

Figure 0.5

US radio spectrum frequency allocation map, 2016.

Susan Douglas has also written about the initial struggles with the intellectual leap required to regulate rights in the spectrum, something that was invisible, all pervasive, seamless, and still quite mysterious as a property in the early twentieth century.⁴⁷ After all, Douglas explains, the air was an element Americans had traditionally associated with freedom, even transcendence.⁴⁸ This spirit of transcendence is a connection to the electromagnetic spectrum that has endured through the present era of virtualizations for data seemingly being transported through the air that we can’t see. Silicon Valley designers and their partners on Madison Avenue have long used these associations when educating the public about how to understand the cloud. Together they have manufactured the cloud’s projected cultural fantasy of an endless resource, benign invisibility, and harmless magic that makes life easier for all. This rendering of such complicated, legally fraught physical infrastructure into a palatable, cartoon-like abstraction for the masses is one of the great