The latest @ClickHereShow episode connects the grassroots protests outside data centers to the monopolistic businesses practices inside. I appreciated the opportunity to contribute to @NPRDina's thoughtful reporting.

If you experienced an outage on Peloton, Signal, Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Lyft, Amtrak, daycare portals, school apps, or government websites, it's because Amazon owns 30% of the cloud computing market. Here's how to encourage competition in this concentrated market:

Scanning a loyalty card might be costing you money. Brands say they’re giving you points, discounts and perks — but many use these programs to track your behavior, build a profile and charge what they think you’ll pay.

Wild

With @Amazon, @Microsoft, and @Google controlling much of the global cloud infrastructure, VPA’s @asad09 offers a detailed plan to restore competition and resilience, from structural reforms to stronger security protections. Read more:

The AI ouroboros

Fuck authoritarianism, and everyone should say so. We are not a country that sends soldiers into our own cities as if it’s enemy territory. I know we Democrats can be annoying but that’s not the main thing right now. We have to stop this, peacefully, together.

A few trillion-dollar companies now comprise an AI oligopoly. Nvidia's announcement to invest $100B in OpenAI makes things worse. As I say in TIME, vertical integration is about money, control, and power. Policymakers should reject such combinations.

We're introducing a new section called Big Ideas, exploring next-generation solutions for pressing policy problems. Today @jamesjbaratta looks at a new report on how to structure the cloud computing industry. https://t.co/5iMsYchokk

Thank you to @TheProspect for featuring my paper, How to Regulate the Cloud. Their focus on the market as “AI’s $600 Billion Blind Spot” brings attention to an ignored part of the AI policy debate. Grateful to see this important conversation gaining wider attention.

The market for cloud computing is huge, but policymakers should pay attention to a new report that shows them how to address the market’s failures and the national-security risks they create. From James Baratta: https://t.co/syBRiesDtf

TikTok US selling for <1x revenue… Maybe I’m missing something but this reminds me of the oligarchs in Russia, license raj in India, privatization in Mexico etc… being close to political power lets folks buy up crown-jewel assets at a fraction of their true value.

VC PERSPECTIVE on H1B: Startups typically raise $2-5M seed rounds. Imagine telling investors: "We need $500K just for H-1B fees for our 5-person engineering team." VCs will ask: "Why not just build the company in Toronto?" Brain drain via cap table economics.

The Biden administration working with social media companies to throttle what they considered COVID misinformation might or might not have been legally principled, but it did at least pretend to have a substantive moral argument that was something like, "We don't want people to

Here’s how we get the healthy, secure cloud market we need.

My paper is a blueprint for reform based on tried & tested regulations: structural separation, neutrality, interoperability, critical infrastructure designation, foreign ownership restrictions, & know-your-customer requirements.

Our reliance on an unregulated and oligopolistic cloud market that is central to the AI race w/ China is a glaring national security risk.

Opaque pricing and high switching costs, including “egress fees” just to move your own data out, make things worse. These failures stifle innovation and lock in dependence on a few players.

Amazon, Microsoft, Google control two-thirds of the market, making it a clear oligopoly. Each is a vertically integrated conglomerate. For AI companies, cloud providers are simultaneously suppliers, customers, competitors, and investors, creating massive conflicts of interest.

Cloud companies pulled in >$600B of revenue–multiples of AI companies. For context, AWS raked in $108B in 2024, while by comparison, OpenAI is hauling in $12B/yr. Even semiconductor companies don’t make as much as AWS.