I share the views of prior commenters that it’s easy to overemphasize these risks. Two reasons:

(1) When we connected our home computers to the web in the 1990’s we got access to undreamed-of resources, and we assumed new risks (still only partly mitigated via firewalls and software) that our information is vulnerable. Each new frontier, the cloud included, invites new larceny, and eventually, amended regulation and other mitigations combining mutual safety and benefit.

(2) Zvi Schreiber, CEO of G.ho.st, uses a powerful analogy: as children, we store our money in a piggy bank because it was the right combination of security, access, and accountability. As adults, we assume new risks when we move our money in the cloud. We do so for the freedom to access our money from most anywhere. If we’re willing to put our financial capital in the cloud, is it really so strange to park more of our information capital there?

To return to the Wild West analogy, not everyone moved west from settled and better-regulated territories; no one forces us to move to the cloud. We’ll go there as we feel the benefits outweigh the risks. We’ll get it wrong sometimes, as is the nature of risk, but we’ll also fix the worst of the ills, or our new western outpost becomes a ghost town…

About the actual paper: I’m afraid Prof. Zittrain is confusing the idea of the cloud with its present reality, i.e. a corporate-controlled cloud. One could imagine a distributed cloud-like structure, where everyone agrees to let 80% of their hard-drive be encrypted with someone else’s files on it, in exchange of the guarantee that their files will never be deleted (thanks to multiple copies on a distributed system). It might not be as efficient as a corporate-controled one, but the technology now being developped for profit will be useful for refuseniks in less then 10 years, well they’ll need to hide something.

Wow, that was a mouthful. As someone who has deployed many services on Amazon’s AWS, Google’s App Engine, and Facebook, for the most part these platforms foster far more creativity and even subversion than more traditional methods. That’s the whole point — they let you focus on what’s new in your application rather than on the logistics of setting something up to scale. They’re podiums/microphones/stadiums on the Internet allowing you to broadcast to the world where you’d previously have to settle for your own sidewalk soapbox.

The creativity these platforms unleash is far greater than the creativity they suppress. In the case of App Engine and AWS, it’s hard to fathom just how much they unleash, as we’re just getting started along that path.

-Adam