Thank you, Geert, for sharing this important article.
I have one question in response which is: Why should we think that Amazon's
EC2 is necessarily any "better" than Facebook or Twitter? After all, in the
case of Wikileaks, it was Amazon that fell like a house of cards at the
slightest political blustering, while, actually, Facebook and Twitter seemed
to hold their ground. Actually, as was previously discussed
here<http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-1101/msg00009.html>,
Twitter even seemed to put their neck on the line a bit in support of
Wikileaks members.
Now I'm not saying Facebook or Twitter in any way provide any sort of way
forward to Dave Winer's goal of a "distributed web", but rather just that
neither does Amazon EC2, as far as I can tell.
Of course, the truly distributed system that we really need may never be
realized. But I believe be a huge step forward would be some truly public
space on the Internet ("public" as in non-commercial and accountable, at
least in some sense, to the people). As far as I know, no such thing exists
-- at least not in the US. Is anyone aware of any such examples in the US or
elsewhere?
I suspect that if Wikileaks had been hosting their server on some truly
public Internet space (if we can even imagine such a thing), we would've
seen some very interesting legal action, instead of the tired argument about
"well, Amazon is a commercial enterprise, so they are free to do with their
customers whatever they chose."
best,
Rory
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