The Column – Cyber Security Week
Two almost simultaneous announcements offer me the possibility of reflection. The first is Microsoft’s announcement that its cloud software packages will have an increase in costs of approximately more than 30 percent. The second is from Amazon which explains how, thanks to its AI-based solutions, it is possible to migrate from the Redmond company’s cloud at negligible costs, thus bypassing the specter of lock-in, i.e. the situation where a supplier makes it impossible for the customer to change because its IT systems are tied to the technological solutions of a specific supplier. Apparently Amazon’s suggestion is: if you want to “kill Windows” you can. Reading these two pieces of news we actually see the same script played by different actors. In the great theater of the cloud, the masters argue animatedly among themselves, but what unites them is deeper than what divides them: the need to hold back their slaves. And the slaves, I’m sorry to remember, are us. Even more so if European, because we enter the arena without autonomous technological supply chains and without alternatives.
The opening scene is simple. A giant announces that the cloud can live very well without Windows: fewer licenses, less costs, more freedom. The other, almost simultaneously, reports increases of 33 percent on its software packages. It seems like a duel, but in reality it is a negotiation between lords of the same house. One proposes emancipation, the other tightens the chain, but both work on the same front: moving the center of gravity from the software owned by one to those controlled by the other.
In the middle there are us, Europeans above all, who have made a sort of substitute citizenship out of the cloud. We didn’t build the engines, we don’t have the keys to the garage and often we don’t even read the rental agreement. As long as everything works, as long as it’s comfortable. It’s the point where naivety becomes a cultural vice: we convince ourselves that a subscription is a modern form of freedom, when in reality it’s an addiction with fancy packaging.
And here it is worth using a metaphor: we are on a vehicle that transports us of which we presume to be behind the wheel, but under a completely sealed hood there is the real driver. It is the manufacturer who decides when to update the control unit, which functions to activate and how much to charge us to keep moving. Every price increase or policy change is not an accident: it’s a reminder of who’s really in charge. And we continue to travel, because we have built neither the road, nor the engine, nor the map that shows us the direction.
The cloud today is this: a system in which two masters negotiate the price of our dependence, while we argue whether a slightly wider window or a brighter corridor is better. But the question is another: would we really want to own at least one room in the house we live in?
Until we address this question, we will remain what we already are: temporary inhabitants on someone else’s land, free to move, but only as far as the owner’s permission goes. If I had to give a definition I would say that we live in the era of technological feudalism, which, moreover, does not need armies: all that is needed are sedimented habits and a pinch of strategic laziness, but perhaps not even very strategic.
