The emergence of cloud computing marks the moment when computing has become, materially and symbolically, infrastructure -- a sociotechnical system that is ubiquitous, essential, and foundational. Increasingly integral to the operation of other critical infrastructures, such as transportation, energy, and finance, it functions, in effect, as a meta-infrastructure. As such, the cloud raises a variety of policy and governance issues, among them market regulation, fairness, access, reliability, privacy, national security, and copyright. In this book, experts from a range of disciplines offer their perspectives on these and other concerns. The contributors consider such topics as the economic implications of the cloud's shifting of computing resources from ownership to rental
the capacity of regulation to promote reliability while preserving innovation
the applicability of contract theory to enforce service guarantees
the differing approaches to privacy taken by United States and the European Union in the post-Snowden era
the delocalization or geographic dispersal of the archive
and the cloud-based virtual representations of our body in electronic health data.ContributorsNicholas Bauch, Jean-Frandcois Blanchette, Marjory Blumenthal, Sandra Braman, Jonathan Cave, Lothar Determann, Luciana Duranti, Svitlana Kobzar, William Lehr, David Nimmer, Andrea Renda, Neil Robinson, Helen Rebecca Schindler, Joe Weinman, Christopher S. Yoo.
Includes bibliographical references and index.