2026-08-05 The cloud giants
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I'm listening to the Tech Won't Save Us podcast episode How Cloud
Giants Wield Their Power Against Us All with Dr. Cecilia Rikap where
she and Paris Marx talk about "control without ownership" and how the
cloud giants are essentially in charge of everything. All the AI
companies being financed by them, all the consultancies helping
companies and governments to move to the cloud, all the startups
taking advantage of the cloud deal, the AI tokens, all the academics
on the payroll of cloud giants, all the open source software
developers laying the ground work for tools that end up on the cloud …
to me it feels as if cloud computing enables most of the economy to
work just like roads used to enable most of the economy to work in the
previous century. The only difference being that all these digital
roads are toll roads owned by three companies: Amazon, Microsoft,
Google. And these companies are beholden to the US government.
Remember their hollow grins as they were sitting at Trump's table. I'd
say that cloud computing should be nationalised, like most of the
roads and railways I see around me, and be broken up by anti-trust
efforts. And if your first thought are about not wanting to stifle
innovation with regulation or that monopolies are only a problem if
prices go up, consider who has been telling these stories and whether
we should trust them.

#AI