Cyber Scene #63 - Cyber Flight Plan: Heavy Cloud Cover; Clipped Wings Alert
Cyber Scene #63 -
Cyber Flight Plan: Heavy Cloud Cover; Clipped Wings Alert
Cyber is reaching new heights, with polar-to-polar, tropospheric, unfettered success executed at Mach 4 speed. This Cyber Scene will focus principally on some of the newest orbiters and what restrictions, or countermeasures are playing against them.
Related to the theatrical creation of metaverse, we will "take it from the top" and begin with the Economist's Schumpeter's (a "nom de plume" weekly editorialist) discussion on 18 December entitled, fittingly, "The billionaire battle for the metaverse." He compares Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Tesla's Elon Musk space race as kids' play compared to Mark Zuckerberg's "billionaire battle …to take people beyond reality." He notes that other tech giants are heading for this alternative reality but that the most "ardent evangelists" are the big firms still controlled by their founders. He names tech leaders from the US to China. He cites Epic's Tim Sweeney speaking with Bloomberg characterizing metaverse as a multitrillion dollar opportunity. Schumpeter goes on to say that the billionaire battle will rely not on rocket science but will be fought "with reality-bending headsets, blockchains, cryptocurrencies and mid-frazzling amounts of computing power." The markets have already reacted, placing their monetary stamp on this development. He describes the disciples' differences: technology bases, designs, political issues (free market vice China's Communist Party "techlash") but they are poised to adjust and jump in. He closes by saying that although these big firm players are "in" to promise a future of an internet which is more open and less controlled, they all want to arrive first in order to "…set the rules to their advantage."
The future may be closer than we think. The 29 December reprint of Wired's Cecilia D'Anastasio's "The Metaverse is Simply Big Tech, Only Bigger," takes a religious tack, proclaiming that "…tomorrow's cyberspace will be empyrean, transcendent, immersive, 3D, and…we will live, and die gathered under one love." She continues, analyzing the consolidation of Big Tech under the metaverse tent. She views, dismissively, one "polite" vision of metaverse collaboration as a quilt with contributions from opposite sides, where metaverse enjoys one open-source standard from which no one reaps billions. She asks: "Why would three or four tech giants partner to make a metaverse when they already spent decades and billions constructing their own?" She pokes holes in other aspects of the metaverse undertaking concluding that the future of metaverse would resemble a world similar to the 1992 dystopian novel, Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, where Amazon would be the landlord, and own all the homes too.
And now to the present issue of the cloud itself. The Economist's 18 December "Cloud atlas" picks up on the current computing (and competing) cloud battles. Like the metaverse of Tomorrowland, this battlefield is growing as well. The bonanza of cloud computing is likened to the discovery of electricity. Startups, per the article, invest 80% of their revenues in cloud computing and drop down to an estimated (2021) 10% of spending on public-cloud services. Spending for 2021 services is pegged at $400bn. For readers who may have attended the Amazon Web Services (AWS)-sponsored Re-Invent, the world's reportedly largest cloud-computing conference, in Las Vegas in December 2021, you may move on to the next discussion. For those who didn't attend, the article includes a graph sketching out spending in billions by type from 2017 to forecasts for 2021 and 2022 and the public cloud percentage of total IT spending. A suggestion was made to recommend that firms might want to build their own private clouds to keep costs down, but this might cap scalability, one of the founding tenets in the creation of cloud computing, according to the article. Meanwhile, AWS is offering detailed, complex services which it views as its competitive advantage. Don't get too excited: the closing paragraph discussing these services is subtitled: "Costly, with a chance of discounts."
Who knew that the cloud atlas would include Africa? (Answer: The Economist, naturally.) On 4 December, "Seeding the cloud" outlines the cyber upheaval much overdue for African communications. Microsoft and Amazon have opened data centers in South Africa and are bringing their cloud services to "the region." Africa is three times the size of the US and the article notes that due to heat the continent is a victim of frequent power cuts. The article does not delve into the many isolated areas, but there are few legacy communication systems to deal with, and investors are pouring in funding. Huawei has a data center of its own, and a large cyber footprint in Africa. Despite the lofty presence of this cloud-based "revolution," it will land through fiber, on steel, and under concrete.
Closer to the 1st world, Bloomberg's Brad Stone's "How Shopify Outfoxed Amazon…" reports that a Canadian upstart directed by Tobi Lutke called Shopify outpaced Amazon in a big way: "What Zoom was to corporate America during the early days of the pandemic, Shopify was to small-business owners, many of whom had never sold a single product online until it became the only way they might stay alive." The CEO wasn't merely the new kid on the block; he was on every block. Shopify expanded with 100% remote work, included companies such as Staples and Chipotle and luminaries such as Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga, and reached out to all the mom-and-pop businesses to achieve tremendous success --$177 bn in as of late December 2021. Headquartered in Ottawa, the CEO now uses "Internet, Everywhere" as his dateline. The written article (with photos) is decidedly "in depth" even for speed readers, but the "readership" can access a 29-minute audio synopsis of this David beating Goliath little-guy-wins story as well.
Now the flip side of the coin lands up, and cyber expansion is under a very large microscope.
The White House has been trying to rein in Big Tech, and the horseman in the saddle is President Biden. In the Economist's "In tech we don't trust" (27 Nov), the change in the President's relationship with Big Tech players is explained as being heavily influenced by Senator Elizabeth Warren. She has been outspoken about the power and, in her opinion, the unregulated nature of technology in the US. Some of her candidates became nominees for the President's selection of members of the National Economic Council and the Federal Trade Commission, inter alia. Senator Warren explains: "He has put people in positions of power who understand tech at a whole new level and are deeply skeptical about many of the current practices." The public policy director of Yelp, Luther Lower, says that it is a good time for complainants who hope for government enforcement of tech regulations, and that this political state is 180 degrees from where Vice-President was in 2016. Now he has a chance of a "do-over." The current White House policy work on Big Tech is determining what battles the White House can win in passing regulatory bills pertaining to tech. Antimonopoly and antitrust legislation is in the mix, but the stage is cluttered with many complicated political issues.
Advancement of tech regulatory legislation has been slow. The New York Times' (NYT) "Congress … Is Still Nowhere Near Reining In Tech" by Cecilia Kang reported on 11 Dec. that these political issues related to Big Tech have shifted from "theater" to gridlock. She reports that in earlier years, Congress didn't necessarily understand Big Tech issues in need of regulation. Now that is not the problem. CEOs fly frequently for hearings before Congress, and staff are much savvier than in the past in background work for the Members. In fact, the article chronicles years of "belly flops" from the Committee Members themselves. Moreover, it wasn't until April 2018 that Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress. No, the issue has devolved into complex political issues not handily resolved, particularly not now.
However, Congress is not in a complete stalemate. The NDAA legislation that was discussed in the previous Cyber Scene was passed by Congress and signed by the President, although on 27 December vice just after Thanksgiving. The passage avoided shutdowns, multi-year contractual issues, and many, many additional and weighty problems.