Regulating The Cloud

The emergence of the cloud as infrastructure: experts from a range of disciplines consider policy issues including reliability, privacy, consumer protection, national security, and copyright. 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. Contributors Nicholas Bauch, Jean-François 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

Der Band dokumentiert die Ergebnisse und Empfehlungen einer Analyse zur Frage, wie sich IT-Gesetze entwickeln sollten, unter der Prämisse, dass die heutige und zukünftige Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologie durch Cloud Computing geprägt ist. Insbesondere entwickelt sich diese Untersuchung auf einer vergleichenden und einer interdisziplinären Achse, d.h. als Rechtsvergleich zwischen EU und US-Recht und interdisziplinär zwischen Recht und IT. Die Arbeit konzentriert sich auf den Schwerpunkt vom Datenschutz und Datensicherheit in Cloud-Umgebungen und analysiert drei Hauptherausforderungen auf dem Weg zu einer effizienteren Cloud-Computing-Regulierung: Verständnis der Gründe für die Entwicklung divergierender Rechtsordnungen und Denkschulen zum IT-Recht Gewährleistung der Privatsphäre und Datenschutz in der Cloud konvergierende Regulierungsansätze für die Cloud in der Hoffnung auf eine harmonisierte Landschaft von IT-Gesetzen in der Zukunft.

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.

This book deals with questions of democracy and governance relating to new technologies. The deployment and application of new technologies is often accompanied with uncertainty as to their long-term (un)intended impacts. New technologies also raise questions about the limits of the law as the line between harmful and beneficial effects is often difficult to draw. The volume explores overarching concepts on how to regulate new technologies and their implications in a diverse and constantly changing society, as well as the way in which regulation can address differing, and sometimes conflicting, societal objectives, such as public health and the protection of privacy. Contributions focus on a broad range of issues such as Citizen Science, Smart Cities, big data, and health care, but also on the role of market regulation for new technologies.The book will serve as a useful research tool for scholars and practitioners interested in the latest developments in the field of technology regulation. Leonie Reins is Assistant Professor at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society (TILT) in The Netherlands.

Building on innovative research undertaken by the 'Cloud Legal Project' at Queen Mary, University of London, this work analyses the key legal and regulatory issues relevant to cloud computing under European and English law.

This open access book brings together perspectives from multiple disciplines including psychology, law, IS, and computer science on data privacy and trust in the cloud. Cloud technology has fueled rapid, dramatic technological change, enabling a level of connectivity that has never been seen before in human history. However, this brave new world comes with problems. Several high-profile cases over the last few years have demonstrated cloud computing's uneasy relationship with data security and trust. This volume explores the numerous technological, process and regulatory solutions presented in academic literature as mechanisms for building trust in the cloud, including GDPR in Europe. The massive acceleration of digital adoption resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic is introducing new and significant security and privacy threats and concerns. Against this backdrop, this book provides a timely reference and organising framework for considering how we will assure privacy and build trust in such a hyper-connected digitally dependent world. This book presents a framework for assurance and accountability in the cloud and reviews the literature on trust, data privacy and protection, and ethics in cloud computing.

Countries are increasingly introducing data localization laws, threatening digital globalization and inhibiting cloud computing adoption despite its acknowledged benefits. This multi-disciplinary book analyzes the EU restriction (including the Privacy Shield and General Data Protection Regulation) through a cloud computing lens, covering historical objectives and practical problems, showing why the focus should move from physical data location to effective jurisdiction over those controlling access to intelligible data, and control of access to data through security.

Adopting a multi-disciplinary and comparative approach, this book focuses on emerging and innovative attempts to tackle privacy and legal issues in cloud computing, such as personal data privacy, security and intellectual property protection. Leading i