Maybe Megacorporations shouldn’t be able to turn the internet off
Did you struggle to access critical internet services yesterday?
Starting from about 7.30am UK time, a major outage took down well over 1,000 large and important websites ranging from banks, telecom companies and cloud-based security devices like Ring doorbell cameras down to popular but perhaps less critical services like Fortnite and Duolingo.
The culprit turned out to be Amazon Web Services. Amazon ceased to be merely a site where you can buy books and other cheap products a long time ago. Their need for massive distributed computer networking to coordinate sales led them to develop a large but not too well known internet infrastructure and webhosting capability. Seeing the potential for revenue generation from it, they started renting out space on that network to other large companies to host their own websites, files, and other infrastructure.
The eventual result is that AWS now underpins something like a third of the entire internet - largely based around the biggest and most important organisations. Even governments have ended up using AWS to host portions of their online activities.
Amazon is also not a corporation that works for the public good. Their shopping platform that you probably know them best for is replete with examples of them using their market power to demote items in shopping searches unless they pay for promotion, for demoting them even if they DO pay, for forcing unfair terms on suppliers that block them from selling if they market their goods cheaper anywhere else (including physical stores) which forces the suppliers to jack UP prices to compensate for Amazons high platform fees, and for blatantly copying popular products to drive competitors out of business.
If this was the physical world, this would be like a Laird who owns the town market charging everyone high rents to sell at their stalls but then also selling their own products at their own stall at a cheaper price because they don’t need to charge themselves that rent.
In the digital world, the Laird also owns the road you use to get to the stall and you can’t use it unless they let you.
It cannot be right that a single megacorporation has so much power over critical portions of the internet. Just last week in our In Common column, we warned that as America slides into its unpredictable and dark place over the course of the Trump Presidency, there is a risk that these corporations effectively hold a killswitch over our infrastructure that allows the USA to hold our economic policies to ransom. If you’re worried about China controlling our critical infrastructure - a valid concern - but not worried about America having similar levels of control, then you’re not taking infrastructure security seriously.
We see now that that vulnerability extends also to accidents like the one that apparently occurred yesterday. It may be a while before we’ll find out if Amazon’s firing of 40% of its cloud-services development team just the day before played any role in the disaster.
The solution to this is resilience. The internet was originally designed to be anti-chokepoint. It was originally designed to be a distributed communications network that could resists a nuclear war. There was nothing in that design that said we had to move to a system where one or two megacorporations could bring the whole thing down because the President told them to, or a tech tripped over a wire, or an overblown chatbot just hallucinated at the wrong moment.
Scotland needs to have a discussion about how to prevent this from tripping us up again. We’ve already called for the Scottish Government to move to Open Source software to reduce the grip of companies like Microsoft from shutting down the civil service or just spying on us and handing information to Trump. Scotland should consider an initiative similar to the EU’s “Eurostack” that seeks to fund Open Source alternatives to US Megacorporations.
The UK Government needs to step in here too with its reserved powers over market competition and monopolies. These Megacorporations need to be broken up and their power curbed. Critical infrastructure needs to be better planned and made more resilient to accidents and deliberate threats.
Now that the internet is “working fine” again, it could be expected that this story is just quietly forgotten about as if it never happened, just like the previous times large chunks of the internet went dark for hours or days. This isn’t a rational response and nor is it an indication that things are fine. It’s a symptom of us ignoring the fact that a few billionaires and their megacorporations could, by accident or by design, make life very difficult for everyone else. Maybe this is something we should fix.
