The Cloud: Boundless Digital Potential or Enclosure 3.0?

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Citation: David Lametti (2012) The Cloud: Boundless Digital Potential or Enclosure 3.0?. Virgina Journal of Law & Technology (RSS)
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): The Cloud: Boundless Digital Potential or Enclosure 3.0?
Download: http://www.vjolt.net/vol17/issue3/v17i3 190 Lametti.pdf
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Summary

Author agrees with others that Cloud a threat to privacy and autonomy, but also may "reduce the range of user possibilities for robust interaction with the Internet/Cloud in a manner which then prevents users from participating in the Internet as creators, collaborators, and sharers", calls latter "Enclosure 3.0" (calls undermining the public domain "Enclosure 2.0").

Metaphors such as the "horizontal" architecture of Internet/Web: end-to-end, interoperable, robust user interaction, open code, but also with choke points.

Cloud changes metaphor, moving computation from "edge" to "core", with more real choke points. Constitutes "quantum leap" in control, that is Enclosure 3.0 rather than 2.1, due to change in architecture.

Possibilities for avoiding "Enclosure 3.0" include anti-trust/competition regulation, publicly-provided clouds, and provision by open source communities. "Internet and Cloud in terms of structure and content" constitute a commons for all.

Closes with policy recommendations corresponding to possibilities for avoiding "Enclosure 3.0".

Theoretical and Practical Relevance

Noted at http://bollier.org/blog/cloud-computing-enclosure

Mildly critiqued at http://autonomo.us/2013/02/05/enclosure-30/