The Many Shades of Clouds: How Law Fails (Us) in Seeing Power in the Digital Economy

Cloud infrastructures form the backbone of our contemporary (digital) production environment. Despite their centrality, legal and scholarly practice have not been treating cloud infrastructures as single objects of/for study. In other words, we have laws for regulating services and products that flow from (within) cloud infrastructures, but we have yet to grapple with their operators' ability to: (1) render things administratively calculable and legible; and (2) to dictate the global tempo of innovation by orchestrating technological trajectories. This is a problem and a consequence of a fragmented legal epistemology that has been constantly searching for gaps to fill in what has been perceived as a linear continuum of legal and technological development. Alas, this paper argues that we (legal scholars and practitioners) have been looking too closely to these developments to be able to see them. In this direction, the paper explains what we have missed in the (non-)regulation of cloud infrastructures, why, and what we can do to start seeing, learning, and talking about them in a way that better reflects their nature and power in modern economies and societies. And, at a time when various jurisdictions around the world are fragmenting the world of cloud infrastructures into lands of “sovereignty” ordered and monitored by multinational corporations, we find this legal and policy endeavor to be as necessary as ever.