Shortly after coining the term "artificial intelligence" in 1956, Stanford University professor John McCarthy spoke of a time when “computing will be packaged as a public utility just as the telephone system," wherein "each subscriber needs to pay only for the capacity he actually uses, but he has access to all programming languages characteristic of a very large system." His prescient vision describes today's cloud industry, where anyone can buy computing power and storage on demand. As McCarthy predicted, the cloud offers today’s businesses and consumers a breadth of turnkey tools and services that, 20 years ago, companies would have had to build and maintain themselves.
Unfortunately, while businesses benefit from the infrastructure and network effects cloud offers, the similarities to earlier telecommunications systems that were hamstrung by heavy concentration and monopolization do not end there. Like the telegraph and telephone markets before it, a few companies dominate a market that underwrites much of modern commerce. Such concentration, combined with anticompetitive business practices, erodes customer choice, creates lock-in, and leads to higher prices for businesses and their customers. Early efforts to reform the industry have been to little effect, but lawmakers can encourage competition by cutting through the various product bundles hyperscalers employ.
