Regulating the Cloud ― Policy for Computing Infrastructure

The emergence of cloud computing marks the moment when computing has become, materially and symbolically, infrastructure -- a sociotechnical system that is ubiquitous, essential, and foundational. Increasingly integral to the operation of other critical infrastructures, such as transportation, energy, and finance, it functions, in effect, as a meta-infrastructure. As such, the cloud raises a variety of policy and governance issues, among them market regulation, fairness, access, reliability, privacy, national security, and copyright. In this book, experts from a range of disciplines offer their perspectives on these and other concerns.

The contributors consider such topics as the economic implications of the cloud's shifting of computing resources from ownership to rental; the capacity of regulation to promote reliability while preserving innovation; the applicability of contract theory to enforce service guarantees; the differing approaches to privacy taken by United States and the European Union in the post-Snowden era; the delocalization or geographic dispersal of the archive; and the cloud-based virtual representations of our body in electronic health data.

ContributorsNicholas Bauch, Jean-Francois Blanchette, Marjory Blumenthal, Sandra Braman, Jonathan Cave, Lothar Determann, Luciana Duranti, Svitlana Kobzar, William Lehr, David Nimmer, Andrea Renda, Neil Robinson, Helen Rebecca Schindler, Joe Weinman, Christopher S. Yoo

Christopher S. Yoo, John H. Chestnut Professor of Law, Communication, and Computer and Information Science, is Founding Director of the Center of Technology, Innovation, and Competition at the University of Pennsylvania. Jean-Francois Blanchette is Associate Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of Burdens of Proof (MIT Press).