Information feudalism and permanent rent in the cloud

By Daniel Dietrich | Published: October 2, 2009

Eine schöner Artikel von Michel Bauwens auf dem Blog der P2P-Foundation: “Information feudalism and permanent rent in the cloud“: Cory Doctorow’s editorial in the Guardian has an implicit warning. Cloud Computing may be the vehicle for extracting permanent financial rents, in a form of license-based feudalism. Cory also thinks it is unwise to rely on a corporate cloud in times of financial turbulence.

Information Feudalism is the thesis implicit in Jeremy Rifkin’s Age of Access that holds that we are entering a regime where the freedom of property makes place for the unfreedom of licensing, in effect placing limits on what we can do with the things we purchase, resulting in a new kind of capitalist serfhood.

Cory Doctorow: “Since the rise of the commercial, civilian internet, investors have dreamed of a return to the high-profitability monopoly telecoms world that the hyper-competitive net annihilated. Investors loved its pay-per-minute model, a model that charged extra for every single “service,” including trivialities such as Caller ID – remember when you had to pay extra to find out who was calling you? Imagine if your ISP tried to charge you for seeing the “FROM” line on your emails before you opened them! Minitel, AOL, MSN — these all shared the model, and had an iPhone-like monopoly over who could provide services on their networks, and what those service-providers would have to pay to supply these services to you, the user.