Rules to manage the digital clouds

[Commentary] Devices such as Apple’s iPod and Amazon’s Kindle once looked like becoming the dominant platforms for media, giving their creators huge sway over fields such as digital music and digital books. But the unveiling last week of Apple’s iCloud again makes clear that these gadgets and their connected online services are just stepping stones. They connect to the ultimate platforms for digital existence: the big data centers that store an increasing amount of the world’s information in “the cloud”.

The battle between companies such as Apple and Google to draw mass digital audiences and suck as much of their users’ personal data as they can into vast centralized repositories has the feeling of an endgame. Other digital platforms merely tended towards monopoly; the cloud operators could be unassailable. Even if users are not trapped by data lock-in, network effects, scale economics and other forces suggest a few will dominate. That is why urgent action is needed to set ground rules for the new cloud players, starting with security. The hacking of the IMF shows few institutions are fully prepared. The guardians of our digital assets must face incentives to take their responsibilities seriously. When things go wrong, they must be held to account. A new system of personal rights, establishing who should have a say in how personal data are used and who may profit from them, is also overdue. Users’ rights should be reinforced with mechanisms that require their active consent more often, rather than the system of tacit approval that currently exists. They should also have the freedom to take all of their data with them when they choose to leave a cloud service, and to leave no digital traces behind. The need for a new system of rights extends to access to media.