The government can get a lot tougher on companies than they currently are in the US. There is a large and somewhat unstoppable public distrust of corporations that will swing the pendulum away from distrust of the government. Whatever part of the federal government that people didn’t trust is having their image re-rehabilitated by DOGE’s idioacy anyway. Corporations will do sneaky lobbying and everything, but at the end of the day they will follow laws that are enforced properly. They don’t have miliataries or private police forces. At least not yet.

I would hope to see cloud service providers fall more under a utility type of regulation, and have the government set up regional ISOs that can buy and distribute services to everyone at regulated prices, and adhere to certain computing standards. This is why I don’t get too mad at billing deals and schemes - if computation, storage, and virtual network infrastructure can be standardized and treated as a utility it would be great for everyone! They deserve to get paid for the power they have to consume and the maintenance and operations cost of a datacenter.

Instead, we see these companies play a very tricky game using the egress costs to capture traffic and activity within their infrastructure. The same strategy applies at Google with ads dictating browser development, at Amazon’s winners and losers based retail business, and everyone’s race to the bottom stealing data for hungry AI model training. It doesn’t work Jim. We need to establish fair legislation for democratizing access to computing and storage at a large scale, the same way we already did with internet access. Instead, we are seeing it go the wrong way with the corporate war against net neutrality from service providers, which is bad for cloud services anyway. In my area, cox was doing some bad stuff, which finally prompted google to come in and deliver fiber they had been teasing for around a decade, which drove costs way down for internet. So hopefully all this stuff will work itself out, but we really need to focus on empowering everyone with access to computation and ownership of their data.

For work, I am lucky enough to work for an employer that has enough pull with AWS that they essentially have to listen to us. But I prefer their open market and transparent, if complicated, pricing to trying to work though a deal with a dozen different other software platform vendors all trying to close business and screw over our clients. Even their sales people are pretty well incentivize to drive service consumption rather than promote lock in. This is leading to a huge problem in AI, but once again I respect the approach AWS is taking with hugging face and making it about flexible consumption than what microsoft and google are doing, trying to shove AI down your throat.