Cloud Policy: A History of Regulating Pipelines, Platforms, and Data (Distribution Matters)

Cloud Policy: A History of Regulating Pipelines, Platforms, and Data (Distribution Matters)

How the United States’ regulation of broadband pipelines, digital platforms, and data—together understood as “the cloud”—has eroded civil liberties, democratic principles, and the foundation of the public interest over the past century. Cloud Policy is a policy history that chronicles how the past century of regulating media infrastructure in the United States has eroded global civil liberties as well as democratic principles and the foundation of the public interest. Jennifer Holt explores the long arc of regulating broadband pipelines, digital platforms, and the data centers that serve as the cloud’s storage facilities—an evolution that is connected to the development of nineteenth- and twentieth-century media and networks, including railroads, highways, telephony, radio, and television. In the process, Cloud Policy unearths the lasting inscriptions of policy written for an analog era and markets that no longer exist on the contemporary governance of digital cloud infrastructure. Cloud Policy brings together numerous perspectives that have thus far remained largely siloed in their respective fields of law, policy, economics, and media studies. The resulting interdisciplinary argument reveals a properly scaled view of the massive challenge facing policymakers today. Holt also addresses the evolving role of the state in the regulation of global cloud infrastructure and the growing influence of corporate gatekeepers and private sector self-governance. Cloud policy’s trajectory, as Holt explains, has enacted a transformation in the cultural valuation of infrastructure as civic good, turning it into a tool of commercial profit generation. Despite these current predicaments, the book’s historical lens ultimately helps the reader to envision restorative interventions and new forms of activism to create a more equitable future for infrastructure policy. “Cloud Policy does an outstanding job of examining how we got where we are. Pipelines, platforms, and data are each examined separately, and the book provides specific recommendations for ensuring a cloud that serves all… This book is well-researched and addresses a crucial issue at an important time.” — Choice “Cloud Policy is a landmark contribution to the study of digital governance, infrastructure policy, and democratic theory in the 21st century. Jennifer Holt has written a book that is historically grounded, intellectually ambitious, and normatively committed to the public good. For scholars, policymakers, technologists, and citizens concerned with the future of the Internet, this book provides both a diagnostic toolkit and a conceptual map for imagining a different digital order—one where cloud systems are not merely efficient but equitable, not merely profitable but accountable.” — International Journal of Communication “This is a timely, comprehensive, beautifully written, and incisive intervention into contemporary digital debates. A vital read for anyone—student, professor, researcher, or ordinary user—who wants to understand the power relations of the pipelines, platforms, and data that increasingly shape our world.”   —Des Freedman, Professor of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London   “In Cloud Policy , Jennifer Holt helps us understand that meaningful digital policy begins with understanding how assumptions developed in the analog era are no longer applicable.” —Tom Wheeler, former Chairman, Federal Communications Commission; author of Techlash: Who Makes the Rules for the Digital Gilded Age?   “Through rigorous research and careful historicizing, Jennifer Holt uncovers the policy roots of a vitally important, but often mystified, infrastructure. Rendered in clear and engaging language, her sophisticated analysis elucidates the regulatory paths that brought us here—and the course we should chart for the future.” —Victor Pickard, Professor, University of Pennsylvania Jennifer Holt is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a former Fellow with the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington, DC. She is the author of Empires of Entertainment and the coeditor of the SAGE Handbook of the Digital Media Economy .