The Politics and Ethics of Cloud Computing

The Economist has a survey on changing corporate IT - clouds, SaaS etc. While it covers many of the  concepts and economics in typical 50,000-foot mainstream-media style, it had an interesting take on future political and ethical issues as more computing moves to the cloud

"The legal and political issues are thornier. Even more than previous cross-border utilities, such as the telephone and the internet, the cloud will be a cosmopolitan prisoner to laws that are mainly local. Personal information will be nowhere and everywhere, but most privacy laws still assume that data resides in one place. It is the same with obscenity, hate crime and libel. And online crooks can easily jump from one jurisdiction to another, whereas the authorities from different countries have yet to learn how to co-operate.

The danger is less that the cloud will be a Wild West than that it will be peopled by too many sheriffs scrapping over the rules. Some enforcers are already stirring up trouble, threatening employees of online companies in one jurisdiction to get their employers based in another to fork over incriminating data for instance. Several governments have passed new laws forcing online firms to retain more data. At some point, cloud providers may find themselves compelled to build data centres in every country where they do business."