Digital Cabals

The last few days have seen unprecedented use of political power by cloud conglomerates like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and others. Digitalization accelerates with such speeds that most governments are hopelessly late (or powerless) in their regulation of equal access and commercial rules.

The most shocking decision comes from Jeff Bezos of Amazon, the company terminated all their cloud services to a company called Parler, which has been labeled as ‘Twitter without censorship’, although it quickly became a ‘Twitter without rules or civility’.

Now with the US Capitol violence and the use of Parler to galvanize supporters, it is easy to understand Jeff’s decision. By reading the fine print in Amazon AWS contract, the law is likely on their side too.

But what is Amazon AWS? For many startups and increasingly also larger blue chip companies, it’s a platform that has pushed itself to be the de facto IT and network infrastructure, being more important to the survival of many clients than electricity or water.

Do you think the electricity, water or heating provider could also decide that the customer engages in illegal or unethical activities, and cut off services? Could this really be done by internal company decisions, without any national judical involvement?

Because of these questions, BaseN has always relied – and continues to rely for the foreseeable future – on own global data centers, own bare metal servers and own global network peering policy. There is no company or government in the world whose internal decisions could suddenly make the distributed BaseN Platform disappear. As per one of our core values – Reliability – we plan ahead and adapt to the changes in the global environment.

When establishing BaseN bit more than 19 years ago, I thought that my military background would not be much of an asset in running a technology company. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Today’s corporate world is all about situational awareness, force concentration, surprise, defence and moral factors; the principles laid out by Carl con Clausewitz. I can feel the hard chair in the barracks auditorium.

//Pasi